Relearning the Olympics-Friendly "Quadrennium" Every Four Years

Meditating on the contrast between the "vintage" men's downhill races and the newer, funky-vocabulary-intensive snowboard halfpipe and slopestyle events, New York Times writer Christopher Clarey used a fairly funky piece of vocabulary himself: quadrennium. He wrote: 

Competitors do all manner of spectacular things above the snow at this postmodern stage of winter sport’s development: backside rodeos, double corks, tail grabs, switch mistys. The gravity-taunting soars on, and as the quadrenniums roll by, the Winter Olympics keep adding fresh diversions in an attempt to catch up with the curve.

Quadrennium means "a period of four years." It comes in handy in describing the period of time you spend in high school or college or a legislator's four-year term, but for the most part quadrennium is an Olympics hanger-on of a word, rotating in and out of our consciousness on a...ahem...quadrennial cycle. (During the current Olympics games, a Google News query shows only 30 citations for quadrennium, all within the last month, with 24 of the 30 results Olympics-related.)

As it turns out, seeing a word once every four years (or two, if you add the summer Olympics into the mix), is not enough for it to stick in our popular consciousness. Most of us find ourselves in the position of sports blogger Paul M. Banks, who recently wrote, "Mike Krzyzewski will return to lead the USA National Team program for a third quadrennium," and then confessed: 

And no, I have no clue what a quadrennium is.

There's no reason he should. Anyone learning words on Vocabulary.com knows that you have to encounter a word repeatedly to truly master it, and even after that, to keep your knowledge fresh, you need that word to pop up from time to time.

How often? Definitely more than once in a quadrennium.