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Controlympics: Winners Who Lost (#3 of 4)
We’re taking one last look back at the most discussed — and controversial — Olympics since Berlin 1936. Previously, we looked at the winners and the losers. Now let’s take a look at winners who in fact lost.
1. Chinese women’s gymnastics team — nobody believes they were all sixteen years old. Not even the Chinese. They may have won gold, and the Chinese may have avoided a scandal as a result of forged documents, but the reality is that sooner or later, someone will talk.
2. Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh — the American bikini-clad, gold medal-winning women’s beach volleyball team may have been the ugliest winners in the entire Olympics. And May-Treanor’s “slap my butt” antics with President Bush set back both the sport and America’s image.
3. Russia — Russian athletes came in third in terms of total number of medals won. After the invasion of Georgia, however, nobody wanted them to win anything. And at one point in the Games, Georgia had as many gold medals as Russia. In addition, Russia’s hosting of the winter games at Sochi in 2014 may be at risk, given their location only fifteen miles from the Russia-Georgia border.
4. Zhang Yimou — the director of the the Opening and Closing ceremonies actually praised the “precision” of North Korean performers and dissed the New York Metropolitan Opera as whiners. He also ignored his own history — as a victim of the Cultural Revolution — to suck up to the Chinese leadership and produce massive extravaganzas without any consideration of the resultant human cost.
5. London 2012 — they may have the next games, but they have to follow what was (setting aside, for the moment, human rights abuses and other problems) the best-organized Games ever. And the London contribution to the Closing Ceremonies was beyond bad.
Next up: the medal winners in the Schadenfreude competition.