Last summer, I covered the Beerlympics, a coed celebration that tested the endurance, skill, and technical prowess of beer lovers from across Seattle. Today, in a snowy backyard surrounded by surprisingly tolerant neighbors, the Winter Beerlympics is well underway. There are four teams competing in nine events; they're quickly drinking their way through a wall of beer cases supplied by social-networking site zoji.com, the official Beerlympics sponsor.

Some Beerlympians are guzzling cheap beer off of an ice luge as others play Turboquarters downstairs, while (relatively) sober judges make marks on clipboards. Tragedy strikes during the Beer Bat Relay: The rules specify that players are to shotgun a beer through a Wiffle bat before spinning around 10 times, dizzily crushing the empty beer can with their boot and then smashing the crushed empty with the bat. One of the players spins off of the playing field and lands face down on icy gravel, splitting his face open in four different places. There is a copious amount of blood, and the Beer Bat Relay is cancelled.

Eventually, Team Duff will win the 2007 Winter Beerlympics, but for now, several beerthletes are practicing building pyramids out of red Dixie cups in the basement for the Egyptian Flip Cup competition. Everyone else is huddled around the injured man. "Are you all right?" someone asks. "Do you want to quit?" "Jesus," the wounded man, holding a bloody towel to his face, snaps, "I'm fine! Let's get on with the games!"

This is the kind of can-do spirit that America needs more of in our non-beer-related Olympians. If only anyone here could pass the drug tests...

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