Ah, the Winter Olympics.

I, for one, feel that my life is more full and enriched now that I know that skinny German women skate around a little circle sideways much faster than Kazakhstanian women.

OK, maybe I'm being too cynical. There are good things about the Winter Olympics. Like, umm ... well, hockey is cool.

The honored, then forgotten about for 1,800 years, then re-honored tradition of the Olympic Games is an attempt to get the world to put aside political and cultural differences and converge on a prominent world city (that at least eight Americans have heard of before) to determine who is truly the best at the ancient arts of luge, snowboarding and curling.

Of course, from time to time certain countries aren't crazy about dropping that war they've been working on to frantically ski across a field and shoot at a piece of paper. From city-state conflicts in ancient Greece to Iranians intentionally disqualifying themselves from competition with Israelis at the 2004 Summer Olympic Games, there are as many instances of politics entering this "politic-free" competition as there are medal events.

There's certainly a lot in the way of getting certain people to put aside their differences, but part of the problem is simple terminology.

From beauty pageants to pro wrestling, more or less every form of organized competition likes to inflate the profile of its champions. Miss World isn't Miss World; she's the confusing and overreaching Miss Universe. Wrestlers are never just Heavyweight Champions, they're World Champions (or Global Honored Crown Champions, if you're Japanese).

The reason for this hyperbole is obvious: It's easier to market something if you make it seem more important and far-reaching than it actually is. However, this invites hurt feelings, particularly when you throw politics and national pride into the mix.

And of course, as the world turns, so go the days of our lives, and our young and restless sports fans have yet another "global" competition to look to now that the frosty games of the roman numeral-ed Olympiad have come to a close.

This year sees the birth of the World Baseball Classic (WBC), a World Cup-style competition set to make the name "World Series" seem sort of silly. Sixteen countries will participate starting this Friday.

Why only 16? Well, because not that many places play baseball, frankly. This, along with Major League Baseball (MLB) bellyaching over doping regulations, led to baseball's removal as an Olympic sport after the 2004 games. Always looking for an opportunity to boost its public image (which is shrinking faster than Jose Canseco's steroid-inflated biceps), MLB stepped up to the plate.

There's an essential flaw with this model, however. Unlike the Olympic Games, which are overseen by an international committee, the WBC is conducted by MLB -- one nation's league. Furthermore, all but six of the games in this year's competition take place in either the mainland United States or Puerto Rico.

This is a U.S.-run competition, rather than an international one, and U.S. interests will be pursued. At no point was this more obvious than in the months leading up to the competition, when the Bush administration fought to prevent Cuba from competing in the Classic. It eventually relented, after Cuba offered to donate all (that's right, all) proceeds from the competition to victims of Hurricane Katrina.

This was not due to lingering anti-Castro ideals. It was an attempt to avoid the embarrassment of the U.S. losing our own competition, on our own soil, to communist Cuba. From the opening-round brackets to rules governing who plays for what team, the WBC is set up to favor the U.S.

I'd speculate that if the U.S. were, in fact, embarrassed in this year's competition, the second World Baseball Classic, set for 2009, might not see the light of day. Declaring the winner of your competition as the best in the world is dangerous enough, but allowing one country to determine a world champion is just asking for trouble. Remember, even the Olympics aren't exactly even-handed; of the teams scoring medals in Torino, only four are from neither North America nor Europe.

Athletes, pro wrestlers and beauty models of the world: Don't strive to be best in the universe. Just try to win, and leave it at that.