Olympic Musings

A few passing thoughts related to the Olympic Games currently taking place a few hours north of where I sit, in Pyeongchang, Korea:

As always, the International Olympic Committee and its major corporate partners have chosen to use the Games as a mock-UN platform for politically correct attitudinizing and blatant hypocrisy of all sorts. This year, not surprisingly, the main theme is gender identity, with the American team in particular having loaned itself out as the universe’s official Open Closet of the Olympic Games.

If you are watching any of the Olympic coverage on TV or through live streaming (my preferred method, since I happily don’t own a TV), you have no doubt been treated — that is to say, assaulted — by repeated exposure to the Proctor & Gamble/IOC quasi-public service announcement featuring the slogan and “hashtag” Love Over Bias

As the revoltingly squishy slogan suggests, these PSAs feature smarmy images of fictional childhood “victims of discrimination” who, thanks to the heroic unconditional love of their mothers — none of the children appear to have fathers, let alone supportive ones — are able to overcome supposed social bias against them to participate in sports against all odds.

Included among the PC iconography: 

  • A European teenage boy, obviously meant to be homosexual, shows off an elegant figure skating pose for his mother, who then notices that the boy has a black eye. (Yeah, right — figure skating has always been biased against homosexuals. Who knew?) 
  • An Asian girl is chopping her hair off in front of the mirror, apparently rejecting feminine stereotypes to pursue her dreams of playing hockey. Her mother, of course, smiles a tearful smile and accepts her daughter’s identity. (Notice that these first two images, taken together, actually promote stereotypes, rather than combatting them: the effeminate male figure skater, the lesbian female athlete.)
  • A black girl jumps up and down on her bed, fantasizing of being a downhill skier, in front of a wall covered in posters of — oh, dear! — white skiing heroines. Her mother supports her in spite of this terrible…uh, racial barrier?… and at the end of the PSA, we see her completing a race before cheering fans, as mom rushes forward to congratulate her daughter on overcoming…what, exactly? Oh, yes! — competing in a sport without role models of her own race. Um…okay. (As a kid, my baseball hero was Andre Dawson. My boxing hero was Larry Holmes: oh, how I prayed as a teenager that Larry would crush the “white hope” ugliness represented by the Gerry Cooney hype, and oh, how delighted I was when, in a great fight — Cooney being much tougher than I had given him credit for — Holmes slowly unravelled the challenger and stopped him. But today, apparently, when everyone is supposed to feel free to “identify as” any one of a hundred imaginary genders, nevertheless no one is allowed to see himself as anything but a representative of his biological race. Your race — the most superficial and meaningless identity group of all — is now, thanks to the “healing” balm of the Obama era, your destiny, and a cause to be fought for, rather than a surface distinction of little consequence. So much for the old benighted fantasies of a “color-blind” world.)
  • A Canadian boy (so the audio-narrated version informs me), so poor that he has to tape his skates together, is encouraged by his mother to be brave and skate on an outdoor rink while other boys (representing the one percent, I suppose) laugh at his shoddy gear. First of all, why would he want to skate with boys who mock him as a loser for his poverty? Secondly, how many children in Canada, the land of ubiquitous hockey for eight months of every year, cannot afford some kind of cheap Canadian Tire skates a lot better than those duct-taped hand-me-downs? Third, how many “rich kids” speed skate in Canada on outdoor rinks, when every small town has at least one fully-equipped public arena booking ice time for skating clubs of all sorts. Finally, and most importantly, kids are notorious for mocking each other over differences of all sorts. Childhood itself used to be a life lesson in developing the thick skin needed to get through a little rejection. Now, those boys who might laugh at a poor friend’s lousy equipment (honestly, I’ve never actually seen that happen) are to be shamed and despised, while mom hugs the dejected little victim into feeling secure. (Yes, that seems like the natural starting point for a successful athletic career! Mom will protect you from the hardship and hurt feelings of being mocked a little by your friends.)

And so on and on it goes, masochistic discrimination fantasy after masochistic discrimination fantasy, and every time the solution being a new world founded on the politico-ethical equivalent of mom’s hugs. That mom’s-hug-world, of course, is “social justice,” the moral re-education of egalitarianism, and neo-Marxist identity politics, all tidily packaged in the ersatz do-gooderism of corporate sponsorship. 


I see today that an America female skier has remarked that she was representing her fellow Americans, but not President Trump, whom she obviously dislikes. For this, she was attacked viciously on the internet by some of Trump’s typical charming admirers — at least some of whom, presumably, are not Russian troll bots. And then, after she failed to win a medal, the Dear Leader’s band of web-gnomes leapt in for the kill, ripping her up on Twitter as a “f***ing loser,” a “liberal b**ch,” a “skank,” a “traitor,” a “hater,” and all the rest of the usual Trump cult witticisms. 

The “hater” remark is just amusing in its unintended irony. “Traitor” is revealing of the essence of the Trump cult, as this supposed traitor explicitly said she was representing her country and “the people of the United States” except Trump. As for the other three epithets quoted above, they sound more like a description of any one of Trump’s trail of bedpost notches, rather than of an Olympic athlete who placed in the top six in her sport.

These people really know how to make America great again, don’t they? Almost as dumb as their vain, thin-skinned, sissified idol. 

Oh, I know — but Hillary, Gorsuch! (Guess what, folks — even Jeb would have accomplished those two things. Live with it.)


I’ve noticed the extensive early media fawning over the North Korean cheerleaders/slaves (which I discussed here) has died down a little — hopefully that metaphor doesn’t also represent the fate of any of the cheerleaders this time around.


Aside from the absurdity of North Korea being allowed to field athletes together with the South Korean team — the ROK’s recently elected progressive government is just full of these little leftist idiocies — the most overtly political inanity of these Games has been the continual presence of the team respectfully dubbed “Olympic Athletes representing Russia” (OAR on your TV screen). The Russian government’s systematic doping program having been exposed by a high-ranking insider in a way that the always two-faced IOC simply could not ignore, the seers of Mt. Olympus made the “brave” (i.e., inescapable) decision to ban the Russian team en masse. Wow, shocking, unprecedented, a strong statement of the IOC’s commitment to clean sports and fair play!

As it turns out, that ban, in practice, meant little more than preventing Russian competitors from being announced to the crowd as “Team Russia.” They are all here in Korea, competing as usual, but as “Olympic Athletes representing Russia.” What a joke the IOC is — no different in spirit or results from the other international “peace and justice” organization on which they model themselves. 

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