A friend pointed this out, and in the moment it seemed most of the Winter Olympic events are just sliding of one type or another. Of course, winter itself might simply be characterized as sliding plus cold.
Does this somehow demean the value of the Games?
I don’t think it demeans anything.
It is winter, like you say, ice and snow are present.
People who create these sports way back in time got the idea by needing to use the environment they lived in to travel.
Do you know how they score the Olympics?
On a sliding scale.
no, ski jumping is a vastly different skillset from hockey to ski jumping to biathlon to figure skating.
Track, football(both) and baseball all involve running, right?
Winter Olympic rules only allow sports that must be done on either snow or ice. That’s why basketball is in the summer Olympics even though it was invented and generally played professionally as a winter sport.
I was about to post exactly this. So, yeah, pretty much by definition, Winter Olympic sports all incorporate some manner of sliding or moving on a slippery frozen surface.
Maybe they should introduce snow ball fighting or performing feats of mathematics in ultra cold conditions.
Basketball on ice skates.
American football or soccer on cross country skis.
Hockey is basically soccer on ice.
Ice sculpture would be nice
Well, there’s shooting.
(Yes, with some sliding on snow. But the shooting is important too.)
It would also be a fun throwback to the competitive sculpture events at the Ancient Greek Olympics (and the modern 1912-1948 Olympics).
Ice fishing. 
Shooting is, of course, also a Summer Olympic sport. It’s the sliding on the snow which makes it a Winter Olympic sport, as the biathlon.
Alphorn playing?
I tend to consider the Summer games the “real” Olympic games.
After all the Greeks did not play all those wacky snow games in Olimpia, they had races, throwing, fighting, soccer…
No reason we couldn’t have Snow Beach Volleyball. Think of the uniforms!
Snowshoe Marathon? 2 and 4 Car Driveway shoveling (Men, Women, Team and Relay)?
The 100-Meter Terminal Burrow.