As exciting as the prospect of an Olympic fortnight always is, even better is the feeling of relief you get when it’s all over, and you don’t have to worry about the athletes anymore. Most sports carry the potential for injury, but not all of them would be called dangerous. Almost all the sports in the winter Olympics, however, are dangerous; an athlete’s body can be wrecked at literally every turn—every turn on the slopes, every turn on the rink, and every turn on the sledding track. On the old ABC show “Wide World of Sports,” the second part of the famous introductory tagline—“the thrill of victory, and the agony of defeat”—was accompanied by a shot of a ski jumper taking a spectacular downhill tumble. Although the footage aired week after week, it never got old, not because someone got hurt but because (as we were informed by our parents) someone didn’t; the jumper was O.K. I don’t think most people want to see accidents; we watch them to make sure that things turn out all right. That, of course, wasn’t what happened the day the Vancouver Olympics opened, when during a training run a twenty-one-year-old Georgian luger, Nodar Kumaritashvili, was killed after he lost control of his sled and catapulted over a low wall into one of the steel beams that lined the final section of the course. Video footage of the accident was everywhere online for a day or so and was then taken down; the still photographs that remain are, in a way, harder to look at, more painful—seeing the young man’s body frozen in the air, at one point seeming to rest on the barrier before flying into the beam, you know what’s coming and are eternally powerless to stop it.

Kumaritashvili’s death, and whether it was avoidable, was the prime subject of Olympics conversation for only about two days, despite the shockingly coarse response of several officials, and despite the troubling questions about whether the host country had, in the preceding weeks and months, limited the training time allotted to athletes from other countries, on a course that was not just the fastest in the world but reportedly faster than it was intended to be. The coach of the Canadian luge team, Wolfgang Staudinger (a former West German Olympic luger), was dismissive of complaints. “It was not a track issue, it was a driving error, hundred per cent,” he said. Before the day had even ended, the Vancouver Organizing Committee and the International Luge Federation had posted a notice on the Games’ main Web site saying that federation officials had been “able to retrace the path of the athlete and concluded there was no indication that the accident was caused by deficiencies in the track.” Nevertheless, as a “preventative” measure, they were raising the wall after the tricky curve and making a “change in the ice profile.” These adjustments were being made, Staudinger said, for “emotional” reasons, to satisfy people’s need to see something reparative being done; for the same reason, the starting points of the races would be moved farther down the track to reduce the lugers’ speeds.

By the next day, the momentum of the Games themselves had overtaken the luge accident, as it had to. Participants in the Olympics have a need for speed; those behind the Olympics have a need to succeed. Much was made of Canada’s effort to win a gold medal on its home turf, which it hadn’t managed to do in two other tries, the last one being twenty-two years ago. An organization was created whose purpose, according to its mission statement, was “to lead the development of Canadian sports to achieve sustainable podium performances at the Olympic and Paralympic Games.” This sounds worthy and proper, but the organization’s name, with its American-style grabbiness, gave the game away: Own the Podium. NBC, for its part, was playing Buy the Podium: the network paid eight hundred and twenty million dollars for broadcast rights. (Two weeks before the Games began, NBC announced that, because of the economic downturn, it expected to lose more than two hundred million dollars.) Ideally, the two-week event gives a network a chance to promote upcoming series and to reinforce its image. This year, it also served as a palate cleanser after the ugly back-and-forth in January between NBC, Jay Leno, and Conan O’Brien. Some ugliness remained. In a promo for Leno’s return to the “Tonight Show” that began airing last week, Leno drives down the Pacific Coast Highway in a convertible, to the sound of a voice singing the Beatles’ line “Get back to where you once belonged.” If I were Conan O’Brien, even with my thirty-two-million-dollar settlement, I might not feel too good about my previous employers so breezily dissing me.

Every time I’ve turned on my computer during the past few Olympics, though, I’ve read complaints about NBC’s coverage, most of them having to do with the network’s habit of showing big events by tape delay, rather than live. We hear the results beforehand, which supposedly takes away the very reason we watch the competitions. I couldn’t disagree more. Most Olympic sports are ones that we never get to see otherwise—or, really, don’t want to see otherwise—and the pleasure of watching them goes beyond the suspense. It has to do with the display of stunning skills and gorgeous bodies, the devotion, and the drive. That may be an exaggeration—I can’t really claim that there’s anything stunning about, say, curling, other than the fact that it exists—but it’s basically true. The Olympics are about moments, and about witnessing those moments, because they don’t last. They’re a kind of Thanksgiving celebration, and you can’t celebrate Thanksgiving without showing up for it; I’m grateful to NBC for preparing the feast. I still find it rude of Fox to schedule “American Idol” during the Olympics, and I’m happy that last week, for the first time since “Idol” began, the Olympics actually beat it in the ratings. It was the day that three Americans won gold medals—Lindsey Vonn in the downhill (so, yay, we don’t have to hear about her shin anymore), Shani Davis in speed skating, and Shaun White in the half-pipe—and my guess is that the early reports of their exploits increased viewership.

Each Olympics brings changes, in the sports and in us. This year, I came around to snowboarding. This may have had something to do with accepting what I can’t change, or perhaps it was the way the sport was filmed this time—with great side shots showing the huge leaps and swoops the boarders took. Four years ago, it looked hokey. This time, it looked like a true alpine sport. The Olympics is a time when we wonder about the big things, such as Why do male skaters dress like that? Why do female skaters dress like that? Why are skaters still using the themes from “Zorba the Greek” and “Love Story”? Are speed-skating outfits comfortable? Why is that sledding event called “the skeleton”? Why does Bob Costas’s hair get darker every year? Where can I get biathlon lessons? Why is there no women’s ski jumping? What’s with all the cowbells? I used to have many questions about curling, but this year I tried to actually understand it. The sport has grown on me, but as it has become less mystifying it has also become less Olympic. If curling is allowed in, there’s no reason that bowling and shuffleboard shouldn’t be, too.

Vancouver won’t be remembered as a great Games; it will be remembered for the senseless death that occurred before the competition even began. Each night, NBC showed the medal counts of the leading countries—a list “sponsored” by McDonald’s—and the exercise seemed jarring, the numbers meaningless in the face of Kumaritashvili’s death. As much as I love the Olympics, these Games can’t be over soon enough.