The Dr. Strangelove Olympics

How do you watch luge in the shadow of nuclear apocalypse?

- Will Leitch

FOUR YEARS AGO, my then-five-months-pregnant wife, in the family room of the new home we had just poured much of our life savings into buying, changed the diaper of a screaming toddler and watched a man on television tell her that her husband, half the planet away, was probably about to get blown up.

The Texas Republican House representative Michael McCaul, merely the Homeland Security Committee chairman, was talking about Sochi, Russia, where I, along with thousands of other journalists, was covering the 2014 Winter Olympics. “I’ve never seen a greater threat, certainly in my lifetime,” he said on Fox News Sunday. “I think there’s a high degree of probability that something will detonate, something will go off, but I do think it’s probably most likely to happen outside of the ring of steel”—the protective perimeter Putin had promised to thwart any terrorism. I remember getting a text from my wife as I was taking a bus home from a ski-jumping event. “Are you in the ring of steel right now?” it said. “Just left!” I texted. She fired back: “Well get back in! You’re gonna blow up!”