I have to admit, I am an Olympics junkie. I will watch just about any Olympic sport. Archery, badminton, skeet shooting, I don't give a shit what it is, because it's Olympics, it's awesome. Love watching the men's indoor volleyball, those guys are just fucking beast. The swimming is always cool, I like watching the diving, the track events. The velodrome cycling is pretty cool, too. Bummed about the weather for the outdoor women's volleyball, because it ruins my favorite Olympic drinking game: Pick a player, and every time they show her pull her bikini bottom out of her ass crack, take a drink. They are saying that with the shitty weather (gee, shitty weather in England... Who woulda thunk it?) the ladies might have to cover up.
That's the same image the news reports used...except they cut off everything to the right of her face. Now that picture looks even hotter. As for her getting banned for a tweet, that's fucking retarded. A world-class athlete has her dream crushed because she wrote something politically incorrect? How idiotic and unjust is that? Also, do we really think that the athletes at the Games are all exemplary human beings? (Not that the tweet even indicates she is necessarily racist)
Is it really though? I actually don't think the tweet was that bad, but combined with her political affiliation, I don't really have a problem with Greece saying, "we don't want this representing us on the world stage." (Yes, I am aware of the irony). Seriously, being an Olympian is an honor and a privilege, and if you can't manage to not publically be offensive, you don't deserve to be there. She can believe anything she wants, but for her to tweet that is idiotic -- it might have gotten her fired from jobs a lot less public and symbolic than being an Olympian. Is she actually hot though? She's in super great shape, obviously, but so is everyone at the Olympics.
Whenever there is an injustice and someone's career or dreams are crushed because of it, the most common response I read is "I don't think the original offense was that bad, but I don't have a problem with the fucked-up, unjust punishment, either"! Why is that, exactly? I'm not trying to single you out, either; a lot of people react the same way. With this attitude, is it any wonder then that media-hyped "scandals" grow increasingly sillier and less relevant by the day, while the real stuff gets ignored? I also like the hypocrisy; for instance, Nom has written jokes a thousand times more "offensive" and un-PC than what this Greek athlete did. Yes, he was smart enough not to do so under his real name on an official Twitter account. But at some point, isn't this an irrelevant distinction? Isn't that just hiding your "crime" better? Essentially, you're fine with someone losing their job/dream over something far more minor than what you yourself write.
Reason #846 is that spandex clearly shows how much bigger one of my testicles is than the other, and reason number #848 is that I insist on referring to Spain as "the Arizona of Europe." If their job is in part to be an official spokesperson for their country, then, absolutely. If you can't manage to not be widely offensive in a public forum, you are not doing a very good job as an Olympian. It's not even like she was flustered into making a statement she didn't really mean -- she just made a really stupid joke for basically no reason. Real stuff. Media hyped spectacle. Which category do you think the Olympics fall into? If she was disarming land-mines and wrote a vaguely offensive tweet, I would say that firing her is pretty stupid and a gross exaggeration. As far as the Olympics go, this is absolutely a work-related failure. I'm going to leave you to think about this whole line of reasoning.
Actually, I'm an equestrian. I've done dressage and eventing seriously enough that at one point I was seriously in contention to go the Olympic trials. I would still be doing it if Shadow hadn't mis-taken that bullfinch and wrenched my lumbar. On the plus side, the doctors said that Shadow came in handy when they were gluing my spine back together, and my puppies seemed to find her quite delicious.
So now, Olympic athletes are "official spokespersons" for their country? I always thought they were just athletes who were really good at their sport. I've also noticed that more and more in defending these kinds of punishments, people invoke the "official representative/spokesperson" argument. Every computer programmer at IBM is an "official spokesperson" for the company. Every cashier at Costco an "official representative". At that point, it becomes just another meaningless cliche/buzzword. And yes, cashiers at Costco and programmers at IBM can and do get fired all the time for "offensive jokes" as well. In other words, ANYONE can lose their job if something they wrote on the Internet is perceived as offensive or un-PC. Yourself included, Nom. Which makes you defending this that much more ironic. By the same logic, you would have "no problem" with losing your own job if anyone tied your real name to your posts on here. For the athletes who spend their lives struggling to make the Olympics, it's as real as anything else in their lives. As rare as a black person riding a horse competitively must be, finding one short and small enough to make the Olympics would be like finding a unicorn.
Olympic athletes are not employees of their countries in the same sense as the people you are comparing them to. Their responsibility is literally to REPRESENT their country. Why do you think their country's name is emblazoned across their chest? The entire of Olympic athletes is symbolic, not economic. As such, a racist makes a poor Olympian these days. How do you not get this? Moreover, even if they WERE employees in the economic sense, their entire job function would be composed of being the public face of their nation. As such, they are not akin to the ordinary IBM employee as much as they are the public spokesperson of a company. And I'm pretty sure any company wouldn't be faulted for cutting ties with a spokesman who presented an public embarrassing face for the company.
Firstly, there is no indication from the tweet that she is actually a racist. If she is, then so are most people on this board for similar racial jokes they have made. Secondly, even assuming she is a hardcore racist because of a single un-PC joke, she is representing her country in an athletic endeavor. She is not representing them in a contest to determine who has the purest and kindest soul. And yes, I "get" that she would be fired (yes, at that level, you can consider it no different than a job) for the tweet. I expected it. But that's also sad; the fact that I have come to expect unjust, cruel bullshit as just another part of modern Western society. Edit- Damn it MoreCowbell, you always edit in more stuff after I have already replied! Yes, this was exactly my point. It's a ubiquitous, fucked-up part of modern society, not just the Olympics. Companies policing the private lives and opinions of their employees and punishing them for it is seen as normal.
You make it sound as if she has some inherent, god-given right to be an Olympian. Your functions as an Olympian are two-fold. You are to compete in your event to the best of your abilities, and you are to present and honorable and likable face for your country. This is the job description. She only did half of it. If you want a competition for the best athletes in the world absent any other consideration, go organize it. No one is stopping you. That, however, is not what the Olympics are or ever have been. She is not a janitor. She is a symbolic representative. This IS her job. If she didn't want her public image to be tied to her contract with the Greek Olympic job, she should have found another line of work. Because it is a fundamental and unavoidable part of what is expected of her. This was her job. She didn't do her job. Therefore, she doesn't have that job any more.
Jesus Christ. You boys always find some way to turn a thread into an argument/dick measuring contest. I'm with $100T2. I'll watch any olympic sport that's on tv. Even in the winter, I try to catch a curling match? game? just because it's something different and IT'S THE OLYMPICS!!! I've even been caught watching that "sport" where they cross country ski and shoot at targets occasionally.
Meanwhile, this charming fellow will still represent France in the Olympics. Assaulting a teen girl? No big deal. Tweeting an un-PC joke? Kicked out of the Olympics.
Getting back to the important discussion here... Id say yes, she's got an above average face and a slammin' body. That works for me. Even though Greek wouldn't even come up in my first 10 guesses for her nationality based off her pictures...
Considering those are different athletes representing different countries with different Olympic boards. It's up to each country to decide what public face it wants representing it, so there's not actually any hypocrisy here. now if that guy were Greek, I'd think you have a point there. And yes, she is smoking hot.
He's French though. I feel he has accuratly represented his country on the world stage in that video.
While the French jokes are easy to make, Mahiedine Mekhissi-Benabbad is actually of Algerian origin. Wow, you can even see a little bit of cameltoe in that shot. This decision by the Greeks is looking like a bigger and bigger travesty by the picture.
Speaking of sexy olympians, I just found out today that Ian Millar, 65, will be representing Canada in the Olympics for the 10th time in show jumping. Luckily, his racist jokes will not keep him out of the games, because the closest thing he has to a Twitter account is a netscape.ca e-mail address that hasn't been used since his grandson set it up for him in 1998.
Check your facts, bro. It's been illegal to ride a unicorn in the Olympics for the past 12 years, after a colt named Whisper got into the amphetamines and shish-kabobbed an entire row of hurdlers. KI, if she had tweeted, "there are too many black people at the Olympics!", should Greece have just said, "oh well, that's her 'private' life!"?