By MICHAEL DAVIDOW, Radio Free New Hampshire

The Olympics are almost over. If, like me, you haven’t been paying attention, it’s worth wondering why. Sports are part of our culture, after all. Like it or not, they matter.

My own experience with spectator sports begins and ends these days with whatever my kid is doing. If he skis, I watch skiing, and I hope that nobody hits him with a pole. If he plays football, I root for him, and I hope that nobody hits him with a pole. If he goes out for lacrosse, I am glad there aren’t poles. What do they have. Sticks.

The Olympics are different. It isn’t personal. It’s national. We root for our country against other countries. This is especially important for the winter Olympics, because how often do we get to obsess about beating Norway?

I wonder if there is a derogatory name for Norwegians that we are no longer supposed to use. I know my Minnesota friends think it’s a big deal, whether you’re Swedish or Norwegian. Sort of like being from New Hampshire or Vermont — a distinction that my Texas-bred wife still refuses to make, on principle. “You are all so small,” she tells me.

This year is different again, though, because the Olympics are taking place in China. And that’s part of the problem — but only part.

China is like Texas: very big and very good at making money. They make money the old-fashioned way: they take it from us Americans, because we’ll buy anything that’s cheap. They have developed the smug attitude towards us of a dope pusher towards his clientele. But that’s one reason the Olympics haven’t grabbed me this year, except in the negative sense. Aside from the fact that nobody wants to hang around with their dealer, it’s simply crazy for us to have given the supposed honor of hosting these Games to a country like China.

For instance: China lacks snow. They had to manufacture it. Then when it did snow, they had too much, and the athletes didn’t like it. The Chinese have also muzzled the press. And spied on the participants. And successfully dominated some joyless-seeming tennis player who recently complained of mistreatment by a government official. Not sure why any of this should be rewarded– but it has been, in spades. Because they had the money to make these Games happen, and that’s all she wrote. Any question that can be answered with “because they had the money” is a pretty sad question to ask.

That’s also not the only reason to snub them this year. Take the athletes themselves. The face of these Games seems to belong to a fashion model, for instance, raised in California, who is skiing for China.

She is good at it. And she is all of eighteen years old. I try to forgive her because she is so young, but when she chirps about how great is it to skip representing America, which for all its flaws is still a place that tries, and represent her homeland instead, a country that has crushed the Hong Kong democracy movement, a country that holds a sword over its neighbor, Taiwan, a country that is happy to pen one of its powerless minorities in re-education camps by the hundreds of thousands, and that’s just for starters, and she says this in a bona-fide gee-whiz California accent, the best I can do for her is to look away. She’s apparently going to Stanford when the skiing is over. Lucky Stanford.

Then, for a sideshow, there’s the Russian figure skater who got caught taking a banned substance. She is also just a kid. She’s fifteen. I can’t imagine the pressure she was under, to successfully represent a country that is presently formally barred from competition because of a doping scandal. I’m sure she’s a good skater. But again, she just makes me look away.

Sports are part of our culture, in the end, and the ones we choose to follow speak about who we are as a country. The Beijing Olympics say this: we care about money and we care about fame.

 And that is why I am much happier watching my kid, and neverminding about the weather in Beijing. In fact, once I find a sport that lacks sticks and poles, then I can really enjoy it.

Michael Davidow of Manchester is a lawyer. He is the author of Gate City, Split Thirty, and The Rocketdyne Commission, three novels about politics and advertising which, taken together, form The Henry Bell Project,  The Book of Order, and his most recent one, The Hunter of Talyashevka . They are available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble.