Well, Bryant Gumbel, here's the difference between the Olympics and the Republican National Convention: At the Olympics, the black guy finishes first.
Gumbel's grumbling about the Winter Games have been swishing around the Internet for the past couple of weeks. Bill Maher, on his HBO "Real Time" Friday night, noted how odd it was for avid golfer Gumbel, "of all people," to be making such comments. Somebody else pointed out that the Summer Games, which feature Africans as well as African-Americans, have a lot of events that the ancient Greeks didn't partake of, either (nor did they play them indoors).
But the latest twist came when a Chicago athlete named Shani Davis won the 1000-meter speed skate this weekend at Turin. Davis, the first African-American to win gold at a Winter Olympics, had been criticized as "selfish" for his decision to skip the U.S. pursuit, a team skating event that's never been held at the Olympics before. Never mind that 1980 Olympic multimedalist Eric Heiden, at the end of a long, equivocating column with a misleading headline, ultimately backed Davis's decision to go for the gold in the 1000m:
Link: NBCOlympics.com - Speed Skating - Heiden: Davis could have raced.
My favorite line from Gumbel's rant was this: "Try not to point out that something’s not really a sport if a pseudo-athlete waits in what’s called a kiss-and-cry area, while some panel of subjective judges decides who won." So what does that make the NFL and NBA, where everyone stands around waiting for the referees to finish watching the instant replay of a game-changing play to decide who won?
Why is everyone minimizing Shani White's achievement in favor of political correctness?
He's the first black athlete to win an individual winter olympic gold medal.
Saying African American wrongly implies that there have been other non-Americans of color winning winter gold before.
Posted by: renton | February 20, 2006 at 12:51 PM
Davis is billed as the first African-American to win gold in an *individual* event.
Good on 'im and everything, but trying to get you Americans to recognize that there are blacks from other countries is, I assume, a pointless task. NBC's triumphalism seems immune to facts of that sort (witness the many discussions on Friday night about forbidden “team” speed skating that “everybody” does, yet is undetectable, yet also is never, ever found on the U.S. team). But I digress.
(No, Joe, you're right -- I remembered Vonetta Flowers, even if NBC didn't. But I should've been precise.--AB)
Posted by: Joe Clark | February 20, 2006 at 05:37 PM
The 2006 Winter Olympics suck. Sorry, but there it is. And it's not because the U.S. isn't walking off with all the gold medals...or even many of the rest. It's because a) this sporting event is being treated like "breaking news," b) they stopped doing the "fun" stuff like profiling the athletes so you had some idea of who was who and what they do (sorry about the smarmy rhyming!) ;) What ever happened to cheering on the contestants no matter what order they finished? What ever happened to pride in their accomplishments (a colleague of mine this morning was derisive because somebody from the Pacific Northwest was tauted on local television for coming in 24th in some skiing event). What ever became of the notion that it takes skill, dedication and practice, practice, practice to even be a participant in the Olympics? (As in, I'm not going to be accepted anytime soon!) Good Lord, we're becoming shallower and shallower by the minute. We should all be ashamed of ourselves! :P
Posted by: S.E. Cook | February 21, 2006 at 01:23 PM