Clapping skis to the pulpy thrash of poles: the Winter Olympics are an ASMR wonderland | Winter Olympics 2026
TMountains always promise escape from the misery of existence at sea level, even a kind of purification. The bracing harshness of the terrain, the apple-pure air, the high-albedo dazzle of sunny snow: at altitude, it seems, everything is thinned down to its essence. The Winter Olympics frequently play on this mythology of purity, but the culture’s quadrennial rise to the shoelaces has rarely been as clarifying as this year. By propelling us to greater heights untroubled by the compromises and compromises that ravage the sport’s nether regions, Milano Cortina delivered images so brilliant and sharp that they also served to reveal how ugly – and morally murky – most non-Olympic team sports have become over the past four years.
As a television spectacle, the excellence of this Olympiad was defined as much by absence as by presence. No gambling ads, no live betting odds cluttering the screen, no tracking of winning percentages, no crazy little segments in which the hosts joke about what the prediction markets are doing: these Games brought pleasure and relief in equal measure to the eyes of a weary audience. It turns out that sport, stripped of all the clutter and grime, can still be a thing of wonder and mystery, agony and beauty. Who would have thought it?
The decontamination of the television screen has given way to what counts in Olympic competition: the efforts of the athletes, above all their crazy contortions and their exploits at ridiculous risk. But it also created a kind of acoustic space, drawing our attention to the percussion the Olympians produce as they throw their bodies against the mountain, on the track and around the rink. The clarity of these Games is as much sonic as visual.
This is not to say that NBC’s coverage in the United States has been impeccable: there have been the usual excesses of rhetoric from commentators; the adenoidal whine of the camera drones was as off-putting as the images they produced were sublime; and thanks to the host network’s commitment to explaining the details of each sport’s rules, viewers probably now know more about the politics of curling’s pig line than we ever wanted. But in the not-so-frequent moments when the action was made clear, the results brought a thrill of aural wonder to these Games. The Olympics have officially joined the ASMR era, but unlike ASMR as it exists on social media, there have been no clicking nails on crisp packets or random spoons of goo to keep us engaged. Instead, viewers were captivated by the sweetest music of all: the sound of other people working.
Movement, steel, fiberglass and ice are the basic ingredients of the Winter Olympics soundscape, but in Milano Cortina the sound was so detailed that we could appreciate even the smallest gestures: the fastening of the monobob’s helmet straps, the nervous click of the alpine skiers’ poles at the top of the slope, the bodily sound of the gates as the slalom racers clear their obstacles, the thud of falls in the free slope. dancing, the collagen pump in the knees of mogul runners.
What exactly is going on here? Volume, acousticians tell us, decreases with altitude: the sound of a horn will be softer and hazier at the top of Mount Everest than at sea level. But thinner air can also make it easier to produce a stickier soundscape: academic research suggests that ejective consonants, which have a glottal, viscous quality, are more common in languages spoken at higher altitudes than in breathy idioms closer to the Wed. Regardless of the state of the science – and I’m no expert in this area, in case that wasn’t already obvious – the explanation for the quality of the soundscape in Milano Cortina may have less to do with physics, altitude and air density than it does with money. For these Games, NBC invested in immersive microphones and a fleet of on-site trucks to ensure the soundscape delivered to our living rooms was as rich and textured as possible. More money in sports broadcasting should be spent on useful things like this rather than partnerships with AI and gambling companies that no sane fan wants.
In speed skating, the jostling of skaters at the start of each team race produced a metallic clash similar to the small ring of a volley of parades in Olympic fencing. The brutality of ice hockey, perhaps the most aurally stimulating winter sport, was underscored in the cranial crack of puck against stick, the brotherly chorus of 10 players crossing the ice as one, the Plexiglas warble of each collision into the glass.
Sound was as crucial as vision in the most electric moments of these Games: think of Choi Gaon’s feathery landings on the final run of the women’s halfpipe, or of Johannes Høsflot Klæbo sprinting up the final climb of the men’s skiathlon, the leather of his skis on the snow producing an audible marker of his obvious distinction over the testers struggling to breathe behind him. Even the silences were amplified in this high-fidelity sound spectacle: the pause after the video reviewer’s verdict was delivered in the 1,500m short-track speed skating final, for example, was a small masterpiece of sports theater, punctuated by the official’s wry smile as he walked away amid the eruption of a cheering crowd.
And what about the strange sounds, these unexpected journeys into acoustics? It is towards non-sporting areas that we must turn to understand them. In the skeleton, the drag of the face shield on the ice produced a cosmic vibrato vaguely reminiscent of drawing a lightsaber in Star Wars. The piercing crescendo of the long hockey stick descent into the ski jump hill sometimes reminded me of a pot of boiling milk, a frothy excess that resolves into the brief silence of the overhead suspension, then ends with the cushioned smack of skis making contact with snow. The luscious beat of cross-country skiers walking with long strides and doubly on the flats? A kind of juice. The furious squid of the brooms curling, while the sweepers struggle to coax the stone into their preferred path? The closest professional sport comes to this is replicating the sound effect of biting into a slice of halloumi. Curling’s colonization of about 90% of the total Olympic program (a rough estimate I just made) was made more palatable by the granularity of the team’s deliberations, the shouted orders and the trash talk picked up on the microphones. In no other sport is the instructional language (“Hold the line, hold the line HARD HARD HARD HAAAAAAARD, HAAAAAAAARD!”) so audibly aggressive; in no other sport can you enjoy such a rich taxonomy of grunts.
Despite all the problems and controversies that continue to haunt the International Olympic Committee, the 2026 Olympics showed the sport in its lightest and most adorable form. Even the great conspiracies and embarrassments of these Games – the judging in the ice dancing final, the contested touching on the curling line, Sturla Holm Lægreid’s tearful apology after winning bronze in the 20km biathlon, the condom shortage – seem strangely homemade next to the industrial venality of modern professional sport, a throwback to an earlier era of artisanal corruption, intrigue fueled by innuendo and apres-ski handkerchiefs. panic. The jazz of drags, clicks, pops and stops of the television screen reinforced these joyful vibrations, a soundtrack so hypnotic that it made Milano Cortina a marvel to the ears as much as the eyes.
