What Olympic sports do you enjoy watching the most?

Ice skating is my favorite sport and the only sport I watch during the Olympics. As a kid growing up in the 80s, kid life was just different, as we had more realistic and wholesome idols than what exists today. There was a huge emphasis on science, the arts and athletics growing up as a kid in the 90s, so in Olympics a lot of us had idols like Debi Thomas and Mary Lou Retton.

But the only ice skater I was excited, and really the only reason I watched the Olympics, to see was Surya Bonaly. Surya is French and represented her country well, but because she was Black, you could tell the judges weren’t willing to give her the recognition she deserved. I don’t really watch the Olympics like that, so I don’t know anything about the judging, but now looking at it through a mature adult lens, you can tell she wasn’t given the spotlight she deserved that her white colleagues got with doing far less, despite doing the most hardest, technical and jaw-dropping moves in the event.

When Surya skated, you could feel the power and energy behind her routines. Every move, and flip you could see the charge up, your heart skips a beat because you know it’s coming and then the ice itself just ripping in her wake and she lands a perfect flip. She was truly an amazing skater to watch and she never disappointed even when she fell. Surya was the Simone Biles of the ice and no one, man or female to this day, has ever been able to duplicate her technique nor beat her records.

I don’t really watch ice skating at all anymore really since she hasn’t competed, because she set a very high bar and expectation that no one has been able to meet, so now I just feel like I’m watching regular ice skating and have felt no motivation to watch today’s Olympic competitions. But, let’s face it, back in the 90s, everyone was watching ice skating and people turned on their TVs to see what she was going to do. If you wanted to see judging, and standard skating, then you watched skaters like Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding, but if you wanted to see a real spicy show that defied physics, broke records (that still haven’t been broken today), kick in your anxiety and pushed the human body to the limits, you watched Surya Bonaly.