Let the Games begin. The sooner, the better.

Once we get this made-for-TV fiasco otherwise known as the Winter Olympics out of the way, the world can refocus its time, energy and ink on the core issues of pitchers and catchers reporting to camp, who’s on the NCAA basketball tournament bubble and who just got booted from “Survivor: Exile Island.”

Don’t flare your nostrils and get all high and mighty on me, either. Pretending to care about figure skating, curling and luge for one fortnight every four years doesn’t make a person more refined, educated or progressive than the next.

There are hard-core mountain, trail and frozen pond enthusiasts who live for this stuff. They won’t sleep until March. This isn’t directed at them. It’s about everyone else who feigns interest in the Games as some sort of status symbol.

Hey, I adore what the Games represent, and I admire how the event has evolved without changing at its core since it began in 1896 with an assist from ancient Greece.

But that’s the problem. That gathering the summer of every leap year is the Olympiad. The Winter Olympics are the illegitimate child of that tradition-rich concept, begrudgingly begun at the behest of disenfranchised winter athletes (predominantly male athletes, no doubt) who didn’t have a Games to call their own. Skiers and skaters from 16 countries gathered by the, uh, dozens in France to celebrate equality in 1924.

Categories have expanded over the years. Most recently, the International Olympic Committee added a slate of “extreme” sports, presumably to help NBC recoup some of the $53 gazillion it spent for broadcast rights by dipping into a new pool of advertisers. More than 2,400 athletes will march in Friday’s opening ceremonies in Turin.

My give-a-darn meter still barely flickers. For one thing, the current Winter Olympics are too white, and it has nothing to do with ethnicity. There’s minimal eye candy for those of us who love our country but despise snow and ice.

Last time I checked, basketball, swimming and wrestling all were sports, and all were contested predominantly in the winter. The same goes for indoor track. So where are they? With approximately 532 different events jockeying for position at the Summer Games and a winter schedule that’s startlingly sparse, could the IOC maybe shuffle one or two around?

If you wish to scoff at that suggestion and play the “tradition” card, please wait until after you’ve checked for leaks in your ceiling while nodding off throughout six hours of skeleton coverage. Then tell me about tradition.

Track and field is a universal endeavor with a talent pool deep enough to share the spotlight at both Olympics. But then, there’s the chance of a few sprinters and shot putters getting to double dip, and no, we mustn’t have any of that. Fourteen bobsledders would march on Washington, London and Munich in a crusade to preserve the sanctity of the Winter Games.

True, we can thank the Winter Olympics for giving the United States its supreme sports moment when a bunch of wide-eyed college hockey players beat the state-subsidized Soviets in 1980.

We always suspected that would be a once-in-a-lifetime celebration, and now we know it for sure. College and junior hockey players have been supplanted by professionals who cared so little about their game that they were willing to sacrifice an entire season in 2004-05. And now, in ’06, I’m supposed to get excited about watching them chase a medal that will end up on eBay the next day?

Sure, I’ll selectively watch some of the coverage on NBC, CNBC, MSNBC, Bravo, VH-1, Lifetime, QVC, the Game Show Network or wherever else it’s sprinkled on the dish.

I’ll watch Seth Wescott because he’s local.

I’ll watch Bode Miller for the same reason most people watch NASCAR and “Saturday Night Live,” to see the win or the wreck and watch the thought police squirm.

I’ll watch biathlon simply to enjoy the delicious duplicity that many of the same people who get misty-eyed about the Olympics abhor guns.

What I won’t do is fall for the myth that these Games are anything more than a glorified world championship in a smattering of niche sports. Calling them Olympics must make the marathon man of Greek lore do a triple Lutz in his grave.

Kalle Oakes is a staff writer. He may be reached at [email protected].