by DAVE ZIRIN
It was called the “Own the Podium” campaign, Canada’s efforts to win enough gold medals to make Ron Paul defect. Its zeal for gold meant such sporting practices as locking athletes from other countries out of the practice facilities. Anything for an edge. This lockout included the luge sliders at the whip-fast run in Whistler. As a result, a Georgian luger by the name of Nodar Kumaritashvili had only one-tenth the practice runs as his Canadian opponents when he lost control and sped to his death.
Poor sportsmanship doesn’t always kill. But it has been evident at every corner of the games, and not just from our neighbors from the North. There was Russian skater Evgeny Plushenko, who, after earning the silver medal, first climbed up to the gold medal spot. “I stepped on the gold medal position because I forgot that I came second,” he said. “To be fair, I felt that I’d stepped on to my position. It wasn’t planned, of course. It’s just that in my brain, I’d won.”
He also decided to go “figure skating macho” by criticizing gold medal winner Evan Lysacek’s gold medal, saying, “If [the] Olympic champion doesn’t know how to jump quad. . . . I don’t know. Now it’s not men’s skating. Now it’s dancing.”
Then there’s the Russian ice pair, Maxim Shabalin and Oksana Domnina, who performed a dance they called a “tribute” to Australian Aboriginal culture. It was a tribute only if you consider Amos & Andy to be a tribute, as well.
Stephen Page, the artistic director of the Bangarra Dance Company, told the AFP news service that their accompanying music was more African or Indian than Aboriginal Australian and their body paint seemed as though “a three-year-old child had drawn it on.” “It looks more like they were trying to emulate the token savage cave man,” he said.
At least Shabalin and Domnina didn’t use their “brown-face” makeup, which they had used in previous routines.
Lest anyone think I’m picking on just the Canadians and the Russians, we also had U.S. skater Johnny Weir say, after coming in sixth, that he lost “not because I wasn’t good enough, just that politically, no one was thinking of me [as a medalist].”
Then there was South Korean gold medalist Lee Jung-Su, who slammed the U.S. speed skater Apollo Ohno as “too aggressive” in a post-race news conference. Even though Lee won the gold and Ohno the silver, Lee said, “Ohno didn’t deserve to stand on the same medal platform as me. I was so enraged that it was hard for me to contain myself during the victory ceremony.” In South Korea, you can buy toilet paper with Ohno’s face on it.
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