In 1980, after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, the United States boycotted the Moscow Summer Olympics. Afghanistan has been invaded again. The United States should seize the opportunity and boycott our own Salt Lake Winter Olympics in February.

The Winter Games, after all, are an embarrassment to sports in general and to the United States in particular. Why should we bother with an event that has managed to produce only a single compelling moment in 76 years? The U.S. hockey team's defeat of the Soviet Union in 1980—the "Miracle on Ice." The miracle was that something interesting happened.

The Winter Olympics must die because its sports—and I use that term loosely—range from the merely dull to the unendurable. The marquee event is figure skating: Ice Capades with awful classical music and worse costumes. Nothing can be called a sport that depends on the whimsy of "artistic impression" and the opinions of nine judges. (Believe me, the Supreme Court makes better theater.) Downhill skiing, snowboarding, luge, bobsled: These are gravity, not sport. Suggestion for improving biathlon, that soporific merger of cross-country skiing and riflery: Make them shoot at each other. Hockey is the only Winter Games event in which competitors make physical contact, in which they play defense, in which they have to think. Not coincidentally, it is the only Winter Games event worth watching. Sports drama depends on human interaction: Winter Olympians interact with a clock.

Some of the events defy explanation. Curling combines the worst of shuffleboard and housekeeping. The contestants use brooms to sweep a path on the ice for a sliding stone. The Salt Lake games are reviving an old sport called "skeleton." Sounds exciting, doesn't it? Like some exceptionally dangerous extreme sport? Skeleton is sledding. They are giving a gold medal for sledding.

The winter Olympic events are not merely bad sports they are bad television. Even the activities that are thrilling when you do them yourself like alpine skiing or snowboarding wilt on television. The Olympic downhill is hours of waiting, punctuated by moments of incomprehensible blur (zip, shoosh, zip, shoosh, game over). Most of the events play so poorly on the air that NBC doesn't bother to cover them. The Winter Games broadcast—even more than the summer one—is a traffic jam of lachrymose up-close-and-personal profiles: the Norwegian cross-country skier whose mother just died of cancer, the Italian bobsledder who survived a scary gondola accident, the courageous Finnish biathlete who struggles every day with the trauma of a vestigial third nipple.

The United States should boycott the Winter Games for a selfish reason as well: We're no good at these so-called sports. It's humiliating to celebrate an eighth-place finish in the luge. It's un-American to place eighth in anything. Are our boys fighting in Tora Bora so that we can finish eighth? If we're not pulling gold medals, we're letting Osama win. Why are the Summer Games so much fun? Because we rule them.

We should also quit so we don't have to pay attention to the dreary teams that do dominate the games. The countries that have won the most winter medals—besides the fourth-place United States—are Russia, Germany, Norway, Austria, Finland, Sweden, and Switzerland—not a one you'd want to spend the afternoon with. Their Olympic heroes are instantly forgettable. Who remembers Matti Nykanen? Bjorn Dahlie? The Protopopovs?

The Summer Olympics allow underdog nations to sneak a few medals: a gold for Senegal here, a few for Thailand there, a fluky bronze for Guatemala. But the Winter Games are just one more opportunity for the overdogs to lord it over the poor, the dark, the Southern.

The Cold War used to coat the Winter Games with at least a veneer of drama: the Manichean face-off between us and the Commie ice devils. Now that's vanished. What's the joy in playing Estonia? The closest the Olympics can get to national conflict is: "Cross-Country: Norway vs. Italy a Heated Rivalry." By Winter Olympic standards, I suppose it is, but hey, that’s just my take on it.