I’ve spent three weeks overlaying the maddest Olympic Games EVER – these are the entire wild tales I’ve lined, from ski jumpers injecting their genitals with acid to high-speed crashes

After three weeks of slipping, sliding and gliding, of collisions, confessions and expulsions, of helmets and helicopters, the Winter Olympics drew to a close on Sunday.

Has there been a more astonishing edition in the recent history of the Games, either in summer or on snow? Or rather, has there been one so willing in its supply of wild narratives?

Naturally, the sport was excellent in all of its curious, unfamiliar forms. It always is. But it was also sublime for the kind of tales we rarely hear in the more scrutinised corners of the sporting world.

Will Arsenal choke? That’s a story we have rehearsed and refreshed for years. Will a ski jumper inject acid into his penis to fly further? That’s original.

And therein lies the weird and wonderful quality that can be discovered when you hoard almost 2,900 athletes on a series of mountains.

Size matters

This was the sixth Olympics I have covered. None of them commenced with the line of questioning that greeted the hierarchy of the World Anti-Doping Agency at their eve-of-Games media briefing in Milan.

Those can be dry, solemn affairs. My contribution had been to ask about the presence here of Eteri Tutberidze, the Russian skating coach who was in Kamila Valieva’s corner when an almighty doping storm erupted at Beijing 2022. Witold Banka, the WADA president, told me he was ‘uncomfortable’, which was punchy enough.

But then a colleague raised reports from a German tabloid that the ski jumpers were injecting hyaluronic acid into their genitals, with the logic being that the bigger the bulge, the further you fly. The sport had some previous with the manipulation of their skin suits, so Banka assured us there would be an investigation if anyone came forward with evidence.

Alas, his grin suggested that was unlikely, and the ski jumpers, five hours away in Cortina, were mostly amused. But then, a fortnight later, a renowned doctor in the field of penile-enlargements came forward – he said he had indeed injected an Olympic-level ski jumper’s penis with hyaluronic acid. Life was simpler when we thought the threat came from steroids.

Confessions of a cheat

There’s always a cheating scandal at the Olympics. The equivalent here cut a different way and was served by the Norwegian biathlete Sturla Holm Laegreid who, lost in the delirium of his bronze medal, confessed on live television to being unfaithful to his girlfriend. His hope was that he might get her back.

He would go on to claim five medals at the Games, a remarkable haul, but his public appeal for clemency didn’t work. She was mortified.

Armed robbery

Biathlon isn’t a sport we know well here. Elsewhere, it’s huge. In fact, the 200,000 tickets sold to watch it made up 20 per cent of the Games total. The venue was towards the end of the Anholz Valley and a party unfolded there, day after day, with boozed-up Nordics bringing a darts vibe to the Olympics. A reminder again that there’s an entire sporting world beyond football and a different shade of tale, too.

It was on February 11 that France’s Julia Simon won gold in the women’s 15km event, one day after a few of us had been alerted to something remarkable in her background. That being her conviction the previous October for credit card fraud and theft, which included raiding the account of her French team-mate Justine Braisaz-Bouchet.

Having received a suspended prison sentence, Simon made the most of her liberty by destroying the field. Chasing down a convicted thief with a gun was evidently cause for caution. Braisaz-Bouchet finished 80th.

Misfortune or misadventure?

The saddest sight of the Games was arguably the most predictable. Wearing bib No 13 and 13 seconds into the 13th run of the day on February 8, Lindsey Vonn crashed in the women’s downhill and was airlifted off the Cortina slopes after shattering her left leg.

Was her accident influenced by the ruptured cruciate ligament she sustained less than a fortnight earlier? She doesn’t believe so, but that grates against common sense and the view of several doctors.

Indisputably, the episode was a traumatic conclusion to a gamble that had led many of us towards giddy predictions after Vonn’s strong runs in qualifying.

A full fortnight after the crash, she was still in hospital, having undergone her fifth surgery to correct the damage.

Best of Britain

This is where perspective is necessary. It would be impossible to argue against Matt Weston after his skeleton gold was followed by another in the mixed event alongside Tabitha Stoecker. More so because his contribution to the latter race lifted Britain from fourth to first.

But there is a valid conversation to be had about the value of a skeleton medal. A limited number of nations contest the sport and almost none match the £5.7million of lottery money that Britain spend to target the lower-hanging fruit of this sport.

For these Games, I’d have Weston top irrespective. But I do believe the relative achievement of Andrew Musgrave in the far more competitive realms of cross-country skiing – a fifth, sixth and 10th in his three events – is superior in other ways. Like Dave Ryding in Alpine skiing, Musgrave has proven across his career that a British Winter Olympian can earn Nordic respect in the events they value most.

Go fourth and multiply

Britain broke two national records here – one in their number of gold medals and another with their five fourth-placed finishes. Some of the latter were impressive, such as 19-year-old Mia Brookes in the snowboard Big Air, where she was a tiny over-rotation away from at least silver in a do-or-die last jump. It was ballsy beyond belief.

But not all four-placed finishes are equal – Bruce Mouat and Jen Dodds capitulated in the mixed curling after being pre-tournament favourites. Kirsty Muir tasted that agonising position twice, in both the freeski slopestyle and Big Air. The first of those was underwhelming, the second was uplifting, and combined it must have been galling.

The British delegation as a whole will be satisfied to have achieved their medal target of between four and eight, but there are still questions to be asked about the value reaped from £25.5m of funding for this cycle.

The dopamine hit of skeleton golds is nice, and we were told that more than 5,000 prospective athletes have enquired how to sign up, but it is highly unlikely more than a dozen will ever make it to an ice chute.

The sport is simply not accessible at grassroots level, so why not use the money in areas where inspiration can lead to participation, such as skiing and snowboarding?

For every fall…

Each Games offers a stirring recovery. Few, if any, were as impressive as that of the American figure skater Alysa Liu, who won the women’s singles aged 20. At 16 she had quit in disillusionment, traumatised by the sport, and only returned two years ago.

Her sport is brutal and the Olympics throw out that unique pressure of having one window every four years to scale Everest. Her victory was good for the soul.

We might say the same of the snowboard mixed relay gold involving Team GB’s Charlotte Bankes and Huw Nightingale, days after they flopped in their individual races. I was at both of Bankes’ press conferences in Bormio, witnessing both her despondency and elation. The Olympics never fails to deliver such emotional variations.

Biggest shock

The tribulations of US figure skater Ilia Malinin, a 21-year-old pioneer who advertised himself as the Quad God and had gone unbeaten in more than two years.

Arguably the biggest favourite in any discipline at the Games, he fell twice and placed eighth. The pressure of the Olympics floored him.

Star performer

I never made it to see Johannes Hoesflot Klaebo and wish I had – the Norwegian cross-country skier, 29, broke a 46-year-old Winter Olympics record by winning six golds here, taking his lifetime haul to 11. He is the Michael Phelps of snow. For context, he won more golds than the nations of Canada and China.

The Olympic-sized myth

The biggest slip here was the decision to expel Ukrainian skeleton pilot Vladyslav Heraskevych over his refusal to remove a helmet depicting athletes killed since the Russian invasion.

The IOC pretend they can maintain a politics-free playground, but it is both naive and hypocritical, with the upshot that their rules backed them into one of the most obscene PR errors in recent years.

As the crow flies

I spent 11 days in Bormio watching the flicks and tricks of the snowboarders and skiers, before heading to Cortina for the curling. As the crow flies, that’s 80 miles east. But buses don’t have wings and mountains don’t offer easy navigation so the route went south, east and north again, totally 13 hours, seven minutes and five changes.

After the artificial snow and inauthentic vibes of the past two Winter Olympics, in Pyeongchang and Beijing, it was excellent to be in a real alpine environment. The scenery was majestic, the drivers occasionally insane. They fitted in nicely.