IT Pros Winter Olympics: 13 Breathtaking Competitions

Few activities engage an audience as effectively as sport. Nowhere is that more apparent than at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, where competitors will publicly struggle to master themselves and their rivals in contests of mental and physical prowess.

The human drama of sport, sadly, remains absent from the technology business, if you exclude iPhone line-waiting, a contest already on its way out. There's no shortage of competition -- we have patent wars, product release races, and battles for market share -- but tech industry conflicts play out on balance sheets, in datacenters, and in living rooms, out of public view.

The tech community needs its own version of the Olympics, a global movement to celebrate success, innovation, and great engineering in a way that affirms our common humanity and incompatible platforms. Just between us, we'll be watching for the crashes, as we do with NASCAR.

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Thomas Claburn has been writing about business and technology since 1996, for publications such as New Architect, PC Computing, InformationWeek, Salon, Wired, and Ziff Davis Smart Business. Before that, he worked in film and television, having earned a not particularly useful ... View Full Bio