The Olympic Movement has a couple of problems.

The Summer Olympics are too big.

The Winter Olympics are too small – by which I mean that large swathes of the globe, broadly countries where it rarely snows, are little interested in them.

Here in Britain, each edition of the Winter Games generally musters a compelling story-line or two: Eddie ‘the Eagle’ Edwards, Alain Baxter, Shelley Rudman, the champion skaters of the 1970s and 80s and, of course, Rhona Martin and the Salt Lake City curlers.

But - unusually snowbound as we have been in recent weeks - many of us remain much more enthralled by the thrills and spills of rugby’s Six Nations Championship and football’s Premier League, which are the main competing February sporting fare.

From time to time too, stories emerge that appear designed to seduce the sun-kissed nations of the world to sit up and take more notice.

This year’s version is the tale of the ‘Snow Leopard’ – Ghanaian skier Kwame Nkrumah-Acheampong – who will be in action in Vancouver/Whistler.

Probably the best-known example from previous years is the Jamaican bobsleigh team.

The frisson of interest that such stories provoke tends, however, to be pretty short-lived - scarcely surprising given the limited appetite of most national audiences for seeing their competitors outclassed.

It seems to me that there is a better way for the Olympic powers very considerably to broaden the appeal of the Winter Games.

What is more, the measure would potentially help with that other problem, by making the Summer Olympics less unwieldy.

The authorities should simply shift some of the indoor sports on the Summer Games programme to the Winter Olympics.

Yes, I can well imagine the caniptions the very thought of this would cause in the myriad associations and committees involved in organising Olympic sport.

But let’s consider one or two examples:

Take volleyball.

Incorporate this in the Winter Games programme and it should stimulate much bigger audiences - and hence more valuable broadcasting rights - in hot countries such as Cuba and Brazil.

Furthermore, fans of the sport would still have the beach volleyball competitions to look forward to at the next Summer Olympics.

Or how about cycling?

How much more excitement would there be now in Britain if Sir Chris Hoy, Victoria Pendleton (pictured) and the rest of Dave Brailsford’s lycra-clad crew were about to take to the boards of a Vancouver velodrome in pursuit of more gold medals?

As with volleyball, cycling would not lose its seat at the Summer Olympics table because of its outdoor events such as BMX and road-racing.

Indeed, such a switch could make even more sense for cycling by alleviating some of the pressure that has forced it and a number of other sports to make particularly tough choices as to which events to include in, or omit from, the Olympic programme.

Weightlifting. Badminton. Hey, you could even talk to FIFA boss Sepp Blatter about inaugurating a five-a-side football competition, although securing the release of top players would be, to say the least, a delicate proposition.

I have no expectation that any of this will happen in the foreseeable future.

But I have yet to be persuaded of why it would not be a positive step.

In fact, if something pretty radical isn’t done to ginger up interest and win the Winter Games a genuinely global audience, it wouldn’t surprise me - in this football-obsessed age - if they didn’t eventually revert to their original role, and time-slot, as the warm-up act for the Main Event in the summer.

David Owen is a specialist sports journalist who worked for 20 years for the Financial Times in the United States, Canada, France and the UK. He ended his FT career as sports editor after the 2006 World Cup and is now freelancing, including covering last year's Beijing Olympics. An archive of Owen’s material may be found by Twitter users at www.twitter.com/dodo938