Welcome to Declassified, a weekly humor column.

It’s finally time for the Winter Olympics, which is just like the regular Olympics, but you have to wear an extra pair of socks before heading to Milano Cortina — incidentally, also the model of my first car.

There’s no shortage of controversy surrounding the winter games, of course, especially after U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) confirmed its agents would be assisting with security. It sounds terrifying — although, if events in Minneapolis taught us anything, it’s that ICE agents have a propensity for falling over on actual ice.

Interestingly, military patrol was an actual Olympic sport at the 1924 games in Chamonix, France. It involved teams cross-country skiing, mountain climbing and shooting, making it marginally more treacherous than walking from one end of Rue de la Loi to the other in a light drizzle. And if the Olympics ever did bring it back, those ICE agents would pretty much be guaranteed a place on the podium.

Military patrol’s potential return to the Olympics would also mean Superman has a chance of winning his first Olympic medal, as Dean Cain, who portrayed Superman in “Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman” in the 1990s, is now a member of ICE. The actor had made headlines in July 2025 for calling the latest Superman film “woke,” after its director described the superhero as an immigrant. Indeed, Superman was born on the planet Krypton and his birth name was Kal-El, so he’d be exactly the sort of person ICE would be looking to deport.

There’s more to Winter Olympics controversy than just ICE, though. There’s also penises! As detailed in Declassified last month, the World Anti-Doping Agency is now investigating claims that some male ski jumpers have been injecting their genitals with acid in order to enlarge the penis and get larger ski suits — a larger surface area means more fabric to catch the wind, and therefore potentially further jumps. Asked by this column if the scandal, dubbed Penis-gate, had been blown out of proportion, the World Anti-Doping Agency hung up the phone.

The World Anti-Doping Agency is, of course, the sworn enemy of the World Pro-Dope Agency, whose head, rapper Snopp Dogg, was in Italy as an Olympic torchbearer.

As the games begin, the EU will doubtless come up with an alternative Olympic medals table, showing how great it would be if member countries competed under a single flag rather than those pesky national ones. And if the EU did ever organize the Olympics, the following sports would be added to the program:

Skating on thin ice, where centrist political parties skate in circles with their eyes closed, hoping the far right will just glide off into the distance;
Après-ski, where the gold medal goes to the last person standing after a night on the Aperol Spritz;
Nordic Combined, a Danish-Finnish-Swedish voting bloc;
and Bobsleigh, in which Slovakia’s Robert Fico and Slovenia’s Robert Golob are pushed down a hill.

CAPTION COMPETITION

” Comedy German meets president of the Carnival Association.”

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Last time, we gave you this photo:

Thanks for all the entries. Here’s the best one from our mailbag — there’s no prize except the gift of laughter, which I think we can all agree is far preferable to cash or booze.

“Bloody gap year students.“

by Angela Wainwright