#72 Don’t get burned by the Olympic Flame
Citius,
Swifter, Higher, Stronger
-Olympic Motto
Well, hopefully the Olympics are over by now, although with the ratings NBC has been getting, I wouldn't put it past them to extend the Games with events like
The Olympics also highlighted the phenomenon of jingoism; ultra-nationalism made all the more urgent by the events of the last year. I've never seen the logic of cheering for a team just because I live nearby, but I kept this opinion unvoiced in mixed company in order to avoid being condemned to the axis of evil. Then again, where am I going to turn: I couldn't tell a Czech from a Slovak at gunpoint, my penchant for Mongolian Beef doesn't help me much, and though I did see some hot Icelandic women, that's probably a conflict of interest.
So I decided to compromise, and instead of cheering for a country, I fervently cheered against one, and I don't think you need a crystal ball to know that I'm talking about everyone's favorite villain:
Now those who are new to this column might ask, "Why France?" Well, I'll tell you, it's not because most Frenchmen have the hygiene of a Scout Troop lost in the woods for a week along with their three-legged dog. And, it's not because that same Scout Troop and three-legged dog could accidentally wander into
Luckily in these Olympics, rooting against the French is easy. I am of course talking about Professional Wrestling. Oh, sorry. I was talking about another "sport" where the athletes put on lots of makeup and frilly costumes, act all emotional in front of the cameras, and the outcome is totally fixed ahead of time. Yes, it's our good friends the skaters.
What is amazing to me is not the scandal with the Canadian figure-skating pair and the French judge, but that people would be shocked to find corruption in the sport. People! Wake up and smell the Swiss Bank Accounts. Setting aside the bribery required to even get the Olympics, there are plenty of events that are all-to-easy to fix; those which require human judgment rather than clocks and scoreboards. These "judges" don't have to have expertise in their event, and each country gets to submit their own people, sort of like putting your Aunt Trudy on the jury for your trial. Worse yet, there have been numerous times when judges who were suspended for cheating were allowed back into the competitions (we need a Megan's Law for skating). To top it off, the judges for the Olympics are selected months before the competition, which is just asking for trouble. If I couldn't get my Aunt Trudy on the jury, I'd at least like six months to make a good impression on them, if you know what I mean.
The fact is, many Olympic sports--from boxing to gymnastics to the beloved skating--are susceptible to corruption, and often are; welcome to the real world. The time to fix this is before an Olympics takes place, not during the heat of the competition. In the case of those Canadian figure-skaters, the International Olympic Committee's (IOC) decision to award duplicate gold medals not only sets a horrible precedent, but may have set world diplomacy back twenty years.
The specifics of the case are mind-boggling. The judging in the pairs competition seemed to be entrenched back in the Cold War. Four judges (Russia, Ukraine, Poland, and China) went with the Russian pair, while the Western-thinking countries (America, Canada, Germany, and Japan) went with the Canadians. Forget the French judge for a moment; if the Canadians were that much better, what were those other four thinking? As biased as the judging might have seemed to have been, the International Skating Union (ISU) couldn't swap the gold and silver medals between the Canadians and the Russians; that might have started WWIII. The logic the ISU used was that if the French judge had been corrupted, to throw their score out left a 4-4 tie; thus the duplicate gold medals. There was an alternate judge (from the Czech Republic), but the ISU couldn't use that score (from another Eastern-European country), because they wouldn't get the desired result.
It's important to know that the real motivation for this medal do-over was not fairness (look at the Olympics' track record), but to quell the American media, which is famous for turning anything into a scandal of Homeric proportions. This public-relations move was a disaster, because it opened Pandora's Box. How many of you remember the '72 Summer Games, when the then Soviets outright stole the Basketball gold medal from the Americans (who have never claimed their silvers). This is just one of many injustices that have happened at the Olympics over the years. Should all of these hosed-over athletes now come forward (with their lawsuit-happy lawyers, I might add), and demand that the Olympics make right? You see what a fiasco this could be.
But, far more importantly, by setting this precedent, the IOC gave every country a ready-made excuse to complain when things don't go their way. Take the Russians, who threatened to pull out of the Games. Yes, they haven't done nearly as well as they usually do while we have as many medals as the last three Olympics, and they are famous complainers, but look at it from their point of view. They think their pairs' figure-skating routine was much more difficult to perform, and should have been graded on a curve (an argument we might have used had things gone the other way). Moreover, there is the longstanding belief by both sides that they can't get fair treatment in the other guy's back yard. But now the Russians (and other countries, like South Korea, for example) are seeing corruption under every curling stone.
Suddenly the scores their females skaters received look suspect, and the Russian skier suspended for a suspicious blood level becomes a rush to judgment. And that big medal discrepancy? The other half of the world sees this as not only coming from the home-court advantage, but from new events which have been added, all very popular in the West and not too many other places.
While surely some of this can be blamed on sour grapes, there's also a ring of truth (we do always fair better on our home-court and many of our medals came in the non-traditional events). More importantly, every American (and Canadian) victory is now tainted, with those from the East wondering what went on behind the scenes. This acrimony totally kills the spirit in what had been a fabulous Olympics. Americans and Canadians may still wrap themselves in their flags and tell themselves everything worked out splendidly, but the rest of the world--the world we want to help us in our war--let me repeat that--the countries we have to have on our side to make our nation safe; these people now look at us far differently. Just the Arrogant Americans (and their upstart Cousins) taking what they want because they feel entitled; this is what much of the world will be saying the next few days and weeks and months. I just wish I could say they were completely wrong.
But look on the bright side: at least we got to make fun of the French!
Slower, Lower, and Weaker,
Hyperion
February 24, 2002
2 comments:
You overate your importance in World War I. I'm sick of americans saying they saved us in the first world war. You came at the last minute and we lost more men in a single battle than the americans did in the entire war. How dare you mock our efforts. And you probably would not even exsist if wasn't for us saving you in your own American revolution. Typical neo-con racist.
I probably do overrate the importance of the American involvement in WWI. I obviously was writing a humorous column, and thus was not taking the time to parse the nuances of what level of aid America gave. That said, it's not hard to make an argument that without American aid Germany might have won or prolonged the war interminably.
How did I mock "your" efforts? The Scout Troop line? That was a shot, I admit, but a funny one, which trumps sensitivity in a humor piece. More importantly, I notice you remain silent on WWII. You want to talk about an abomination: France is on the permanent UN Security Council, ostensibly given to the "winners" of WWII. Surely there is a difference between "winner" and "got saved."
As for the American Revolution, of course you're right there. French involvement was a huge reason America was able to fight long enough for Britain to quit. (Notice I don't say America won that war. I actually know a considerable bit about history, and Britain could have won that war had they chosen to. In fact, it was piracy--what they'd call terrorism now--that made Britain quit far more than Washingon's efforts. Most Americans don't want to know that.
As for calling me a typical neo-con racist, allow me educate you. French people are not a race. If you are going to accuse someone of a horrible thing, you should at least know what the word means. You should have called me a xenophobe or a Francophobe. You would have been wrong, but at least your terminology was right. As for neo-con, all I can do is roll my eyes. I have never found anyone yet who even knew what the term meant, let alone used it correctly.
Moreover, if you had read closely this column, you would have seen that I abhor jingoism, which is the entire reason I wrote the column. Yes, I took shots at France, but I don't consider America to be a better place than anyone else. I just get tired of a country that traces it's lineage back to cave men days forgetting the Marshall Plan entirely. I get annoyed that France goes on and on about torture, when they themselves made sure the UN exempted previous acts when the torture laws were written, because France acted so abominably in their colonies, specifically Algeria. Didn't know that? Read up on your country. One of the worst human rights records in a long long time. Am I saying its black and white? No. But it's pretty galling (what a great pun!) that France would lecture anybody about human rights with their atrocities so recently in the past. (Of course, I often feel that way about America, with slavery and the American Indians, but France's mistreatment is more on point.)
Lastly--and this is key--you obviously haven't read my stuff. I have almost 1 million words written on my various sites. If you had, you would know that I don't even consider myself American, let alone a rah-rah supporter. But you didn't do that. Fine. You only read the parts that interested you. Fine. You took offense. Fine. But you didn't even have the courage to leave a name, an email address: anything. You commented as Anonymous. Sir, you are worse than a Frenchman. At least the French soldiers went down bravely on the field of battle, often betrayed by incompetent leaders. But you? Did you step bravely onto the Champ de Mars, ready for battle? No. You attacked with a horrible accusation, and then ran and hid. You're not a Frenchman. You're just a coward. I'm ashamed that I ever slept with your mother.
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