Okay, help me out here.

Last night I was watching the Men’s Moguls competition from Vancouver. Absolutely fantastic fun, lots of drama, the thrill of victory, apeshit Canadians, etc. But this particular event, probably moreso than anything this side of parkour, drives me bonkers. (No, figure skating and synchronized swimming aren’t sports. Anytime you can trigger controversy because your tutu is trimmed in fur, whatever you’re doing isn’t a sport. Period. Let’s move along.)

Here’s the problem.

What part of hurtling a zillion miles an hour down a double-black mogul field isn’t good enough for you? I mean, powder, skis, a steep mountain and a stopwatch – that sounds like a pretty good sport to me. In fact, it sounds like some other time-tested sports, plus the complication of all those cruciate-buckling bumps. Pass me a beer and turn up the volume, eh?

So why do they have to add the gratuitous element of judging? Seriously. Why, at various intervals, is it necessary to insert jumps – which are to skiing moguls as beat poetry is to yak-dressing – unnecessarily complicating the affair with style points?!

Imagine if the same pot-addled hippie slackers had invented track and field. You’d have an event where you sprint 30 meters, then do a ten-yard tumbling run. 30 more meters, then you do a couple backflips off a minitramp. Then you sprint the rest of the way. Six judges (at least one of which hails from a nation you’re at war with) score your tumbling from zero to six points each (factoring in degree of difficulty and artistic impression – so fur is a plus here), and that number is combined with your time to the finish line to yield your final score.

We call it the “100-meter dash.” And you don’t even want to think about what these people would do to the 5,000-meter steeplechase (but it involves a stop at Starbuck’s).

Look, bitches. We let all your wack-ass skate-punk X Games derivations into the real Olympics (granted, this was mainly because the TV folks desperately needed something that Americans could win at), baggy pants, bad posture and all. And admittedly, the results haven’t been all bad. Hell, we freakin’ love snowboard-cross, and it’s hard not to jam on a guy whose nickname is “The Flying Tomato.”

But can we please leave well enough alone? I get that some sports require judges (half-pipe, freestyle, etc.), but when you have an event that works just fine as a real hell-for-leather race, can we just, you know, race?

Next time around, I want the moguls to involve young people with no instinct for self-preservation whatsoever jumping off the side of a mountain, and the first one to the bottom who doesn’t explode one or more knees wins. Period.

Thank you. We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming, already in progress.