Dan Snow's History of the Winter Olympics, BBC Two, review

As Dan Snow swooshed through the Alps on his skis, jut-jawed and disappearing ever further into his own eyebrows, he made it pretty clear that he was more of a historian than a sportsman. His broad theme in Dan Snow’s History of the Winter Olympics (BBC Two), showing tonight in Scotland, was that the Winter Olympics has always been a battleground for competing national ideologies, the world’s political landscape in chilly, wet microcosm.

The 2014 Games in Sochi are, of course, mired in controversy but Snow charted tensions in the Winter Olympics stretching right back to the Thirties. He visited the site of the 1936 Games in Garmisch-Partenkirchen in Germany, a precursor to the infamous Nazi summer Games in Berlin, and told us how the Cold War was played out on ice at the 1980 Games at Lake Placid, New York, with the underdog American ice hockey team’s defeat of multiple world champions the USSR (whose definition of “amateur” seemed pretty loose).

More than once, Snow returned to his old Oxford college, Balliol, marvelling at the skiing achievements of the British upper classes. Early ski pioneer Arnold Lunn, we heard, was also a Balliol man. That seemed to be the only real connection Snow had to his material.

He admitted that he had never been that involved in sport, and he never professed his own passion for the Games, which sometimes made me wonder why he was bothering to tell us all this. But then, why do you think Snow was chosen to present a programme about the history of the Winter Olympics? I’m not convinced he’d have got the gig if his name was Dan Sunny-Spells.

It’s impossible to dull the Winter Olympics’ sparkle though. Archive material made the early Games look like a Scandinavian fairytale: back then, the Alps were flecked with gentlemen mountaineers (chief among them Lunn) in tweed, ice fringing their moustaches, swinging down the mountainside on heavy wooden skis.

The history of the Winter Olympics is so full of glamour and intrigue that a programme about it is always going to be interesting to a degree, but Snow meandered too widely across politics, glory days, war and petty rivalries to give real weight to any of his arguments. Boxing may be a summer sport, but this documentary could have done with some punch.

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