AND so today begins the most unlikely sporting show on earth.

While the Olympics has to be the biggest global challenge of athletic ability to include every nation – just about – on the planet, we are currently warming (in our hearts and hopefully not in a global manner that may render nearly all the events distinctly waterlogged) to the Winter Olympics.

Aside from America’s sporting isolation due to inventing their own games out of spite just because all the good ones were conceived in the British Isles, never has an international competition really betrayed the fact that the fundamentals of the included competitions bend themselves towards certain nations such as Iceland, Finland, Norway, Switzerland, Austria and anywhere else that has a climate that comes with oodles of snow and ice.

However, even then what goes on at the winter games always warps credulity in my mind.

I’ll admit I’m a simple sort who over the years has been happy to chase a ball around a field and who can understand the urge to run, jump or throw things further than someone else.

But just how do you decide to get involved in some of these winter escapades is beyond me.

I will readily accept that if you live in a cold climate the ability to skate across frozen water or ski over snowy wastes is a prerequisite to simply getting stuff done.

However, just how you get to a point where you refine these everyday tasks into contests like downhill skiing, ski jumping, any form of bobsled or curling (I mean I ask you, bowls on ice, that’s for the guys at the Griffin Inn alone, surely!) and then think ‘well that’s a great idea’ is beyond me.

To take the skiing bit first there is distinctly a thrill to it all – hence all the so-called ‘extreme’ versions that are now accepted sports – but surely cross-country, in which Huddersfield’s own Fiona Hughes is competing, is the only natural form of this art.

The other forms involve getting as high up a mountain as possible before hurtling down precipices at ridiculous speeds (downhill and slalom) or hurling yourself off an equally steep ramp without the aid of poles to effect the momentary sensation of flying before returning swiftly to a cold, hard and unwelcoming surface (jumping and the newer ‘freestyle’ varieties).

For the sake of sounding like a three-year-old, every time I hear a skier defend their sport I answer every comment with ‘but why?’

The simple facts are that to have to ski down a mountain you have to get up it first. So by rights this sport is only for the incurably inquisitive, because otherwise you could simply ask someone who has just come down the said peak on two bits of wood and ask “Was there anything interesting up there?” and when they say “No, I just had to ski back down” you can save a whole load of time and effort by not going up in the first place.

As for the jumping types, ‘but why?’ will suffice (though obviously in the case of Eddie ‘The Eagle’ Edwards this does not apply because you already know the answer).

Then we come to the sleighing events – no doubt inspired by a guy called Santa Claus who cheated anyway by using livestock for propulsion – in which Great Britain’s Shelley Rudman will hopefully be queen of the scene in Vancouver in the skeleton bob.

The simplest way I can sum this sport up is that a week or so ago the Examiner ran a front page story showing people struggling to deal with the black ice that had taken a grip in the cold snap.

Now just how many of them as they crawled over the dangerous surface thought ‘pot this, if I nip home and get a tea tray I’ll be at work in 10 minutes.’ My guess would be none – however if you are an exception in this case please urgently contact our newsdesk on 437712 and, after that, even Max Clifford might be interested.

Now I love the Disney movie Cool Runnings and the real story of the Jamaican bobsleigh team of Calgary 1988 is in fact more incredible than the film, but when I mull it all over you have to assume they must have been so incredibly bored that they were at a state where serious therapy was the sensible option rather than getting in a tin deathtrap in surroundings so utterly alien to them. For goodness sake these guys are from the very place where finding nothing to do has been turned into an art form.

And so to curling. The sport is a similar concept to bowls or cruise liner deck quoits and as such is fine – but how on earth do you decide that your athletic career is going to be based around brushing a surface very hard.

The Scots are great at this and I can only assume the team is made up of the best office cleaners they could find between Stranraer and Stornoway, but I have to say if you ran this one past the careers tutor in secondary school there is every chance you weren’t taken over-seriously by the teaching staff through O-level.

But, seriously, I hope that all the Team GB guys and gals who are out there do their best in their chosen events and bring home an armful of medals – just so long as they don’t even begin to try and explain to me why they do it!