Sport on TV: Dr Ice keeps his cool as double lugers huddle up to keep warm

Rumours that the greatest apologist – sorry, golfer – in the world, Tiger Woods, has been summoned by the organisers of the Winter Olympics to say sorry for the lack of snow are unfounded. But it might not be a bad idea for him to go up to Vancouver. Relations between the serial cheat and his wife Elin are so icy that he is not just walking around under a cloud, he's enswirled in a full-scale blizzard. But frigid he ain't.

Tiger's better half probably thinks she should have followed him around the world, in the style of Britain's bob skeleton couple Shelly Rudman and Kristan Bromley. Bromley, aka "Dr Ice", told the Beeb's Winter Olympics highlights programme (BBC2, Thursday): "We have to be a little bit selfish when it comes to race preparation. We turn off the relationship and turn on the athlete." That's what Tiger's female entourage spend their time trying to do, seemingly with great success.

Sport doesn't have to be so mutually exclusive for couples, though. Just look at another of the sliding events at the Winter Games, the double luge – surely the first openly gay Olympic discipline, in which one man lies on top of the other as they hurtle downhill with only a couple of skins of Lycra between them (it's not immediately obvious how they manage to stick together). It seems only fair that they should introduce a heterosexual version as well.

A new sport makes its debut today: ski-cross. It is following in the wake of the hugely successful snowboard-cross, in which four riders compete against each other – and frequently collide. This is modern sport on TV; more like a computer game than real footage, and adored by a similarly youthful audience.

The BBC showed the men's cross final at least 20 times, but the commentators, Ed Leigh and Norway's Stine Brun Kjeldaas, have mercifully eschewed all those annoying yoof coinages such as "phat" and "rad" and "so, like, totally awesome, dude". Perhaps even those are terribly passé now. Some of the boarders are even entering their thirties and no longer acting like a bunch of spoilt trustafarians.

But the half-pipe, the acrobatic boarding event, still looks like a gang of urchins doing skateboard tricks in the park. So why has skateboarding itself never become an Olympic sport, if the likes of synchronised swimming and rhythmic gymnastics have been included for the past six Summer Games? Next up, however, must be that US speciality, waterboarding.

The father and brother of Melissa Hollingsworth, Amy Williams' greatest rival for skeleton gold on Friday night, are both rodeo bull-riders, apparently. Bucking Bronco is unlikely to become an Olympic sport any time soon, but it could be a new career for Tiger. For the time being, though, he will have to settle for skating on thin ice.