In the lead up to the 2026 Winter Olympics, NBC promotions for the games in the United States often featured skier Lindsey Vonn. In one of the advertisements named “Battle Scars,” Vonn and actress Scarlett Johansson engage in an awkward bit of Comcast corporate synergy, simultaneously promoting the conglomerate’s streaming platform Peacock, its most recent Jurassic Park film, and the Winter Games. In the advertisement, Vonn and Johansson compare injuries they have sustained in movie making and in competition in the winter sports.

Perhaps it was this omnipresent advertisement, or Lindsey Vonn’s injury just prior to the start of the Olympic games, or the one she sustained during the Olympic games, that primed me for the realization that one of the things that distinguishes the Winter Olympics from the Summer Olympics is the danger of winter sports. Whether it was a sliced face in speedskating, crashes in alpine skiing, bobsledding, and “Big Air,” or hockey induced dental injuries, I just kept thinking about how dangerous these sports were and how frequently world class athletes were “wiping out” or sustaining serious injuries. By comparison, I struggled to think of Summer Olympic sports in which crashes and major injury were so prominently part of the viewing experience.

Brandon Buehler and Steve Marston have written about injury videos as part of the visual tapestry of sports media and argue that these videos tap into “the sort of affective excess more commonly associated with fictional ‘body genres’ such as horror and melodrama.” Given the comparison to horror, Comcast may be on to something connecting winter sports and their dinosaur franchise. Buehler and Marston point out that the official broadcast tends to point the cameras away from gruesome injuries, eschewing replays of the injuries so as not to exploit the pain of the athletes. This does not stop these clips from circulating online and becoming the subjects of viral video legend. 

The Winter Olympics are especially ripe for this “injury video” viral treatment because for so many viewers the sports are foreign. The cost and geographic exclusivity of participating in Winter Olympic sports leaves many viewers without firsthand experience of playing the sports. Without this athletic and affective knowledge, the viewers must rely on their understanding of gravity, speed, cold, and slipperiness, to be able to empathize with the athletes efforts. Watching in this way can increase the sense of anxiety and danger one feels when watching the sports. Without the knowledge of the skill sets and the bodily experience of the sport, viewers are left with the speeds, heights, and razor’s edge televisuality which all seem to be screaming “danger.”

NBC seems aware of the “rubbernecking” viewing and the affective excess their viewers are drawn to when watching the Winter Olympics. While the NBC main broadcast does tend to avoid showing replays of dangerous crashes, the media company also compiles highlight videos of these crashes on their social media platforms (as seen in the accompanying clip). When I searched for an equivalent YouTube blooper/crash/injury video compilation for the Summer Olympics, the closest I could fine was a clip for the cycling competitions from the 2024 Paris Olympics. I only found this after scrolling through dozens of NBC Sports crash compilations from the Winter Olympics throughout the years. Given NBC’s embrace of injury videos and wipeout compilations, it may be appropriate to say that while injury videos may have started out as an example of the fragmentation of the sports media audience, they have revealed a dominant frame for watching the Winter Olympic games. By emphasizing the bodily realities of the sports, it makes the games and the skills of the athletes legible to the audience and does so without having to require an understanding of the rules of the game.