Snowboarding has so many technical terms that the BBC provides a short clip of its commentators explaining the basics, just so that the commentary is bordering on understandable. The pride you'll feel when you can identify a "backside double cork 1080" on your own is akin to actually landing one, or so we armchair sportspeople tell ourselves.
10. Breathtaking Footage
It just so happens that if a lot of your events are up in the mountains, you're going to get some spectacular views, and although the BBC coverage hasn't lingered on it we have been treated to some beautiful panoramas in Sochi. That's not even taking into account the events themselves, in which the commentators often urge viewers to press pause and take in the gravity-defying skill needed to pull off some of those tricks. Slow motion replay has never been so pretty.
9. The Commentator's Curse
Much of day four was spent hyping the men's snowboard halfpipe final in which Shaun White, the defending champion, was aiming to keep his title. We were told of his excellence multiple times throughout the day, including in an interview in which White, too, agreed that he was pretty good at this snowboarding thing, and the commentators got embarrassingly breathless every time he appeared. In the final itself, he wiped out once and then landed a routine which left him outside the medals for the first time in years. It wouldn't be surprising if the BBC already had his post-victory interview all scripted and were forced to hastily hide the evidence where nobody will ever find it.