It's been an incredible opening weekend of the PyeongChang Games! And I'm glad that the competition in Korea has been the story. Because there were a pair of stories just prior to the start of the Olympics that had the chance to overshadow the competition. Fortunately, that hasn't happened, mainly because people quickly dismissed the comments for the idiocy that they were.
I wish it was as easy for me to overlook such ignorance. I can't, though. Because they both really bothered me. The first was Shani Davis throwing a temper tantrum that he wasn't chosen as the American flag bearer for the Opening Ceremony. The other was much more disturbing. The Fox News executive who, rather than celebrating Team USA for its diversity, was critical of it instead.
The Shani Davis thing is a lot more straight forward and much easier to tackle, so we'll start there. Luger Erin Hamlin was announced as the Team USA flag bearer on Thursday night, a tremendous honor for any Olympian. But leave it to Shani Davis to take that moment from Erin Hamlin and make it all about himself.
Selecting the flag bearer is actually a pretty meticulous process. Each team chooses a captain, and that captain chooses a nominee from their sport. The captains then all get together and vote on a flag bearer from those candidates. If there's a tie, there's a coin toss. Those were the rules set forth by the USOC. So, when Hamlin and Davis each got four votes, it went to a coin toss. They didn't arbitrarily decide to have one. Everyone knew going in that was the process. Hamlin won the coin flip and was named the USA flag bearer.
How this process is at all controversial I have no idea, but evidently Shani Davis didn't like the idea of letting a coin toss decide it, and he took to Twitter to whine. He spewed off all of his stats, implying that alone should've made him the selection. I'm not going to disagree with his athletic credentials. That's why he was the speed skating nominee. But there's also much more that goes into it than just your athletic credentials.
If Davis had left it at that, it wouldn't have been an issue. But he took it to a complete other level by ending it with #blackhistorymonth, implying that there was some sort of racial motivation for his losing a coin toss. That's not only the furthest thing from the truth, it's a totally asinine thing to even think. It's also an incredibly immature and disrespectful reaction. And it only served to make Shani Davis look bad. He came off as an incredibly sore loser. Nothing else.
He took Erin Hamlin's moment and made it all about himself. Fortunately, NBC didn't mention Shani Davis at all during the Opening Ceremony. Davis, by the way, stayed back at the Village and pouted instead of marching in the Opening Ceremony, although he claimed he was never planning on going and only reconsidered when he found out he was in the running to be flag bearer. Sure, Shani.
And just when I though Shani Davis would provide us with the most idiotic, ignorant comments in the pre-Olympic build up, I was proven wrong. The Fox News guy (whose name I don't know and I don't care to know) absolutely takes the cake in that department.
This year's U.S. Olympic team is one of the most diverse in history. The USOC is proud of that diversity, and rightfully so. (That is, after all, one of the basic principles of this country, that everyone is created equal.) But the Fox News guy evidently has a problem with this for some reason. He even went so far as to suggest the USOC had some sort of quota system and even recommended a new motto: "Darker, Gayer, Different."
Now, you don't need me to tell you how wrong his views are, in a number of ways. But I'll start with the easiest counterpoint. The U.S. Olympic Team is the hardest in the world to make. In order to make it, you have to make it. Maame Biney made the team. She wasn't put on it because she's black. Adam Rippon was selected to the team because was one of the three best skaters, not because he's gay. Chloe Kim's on the team because she's the best in the world at women's halfpipe snowboarding. And, to go back to Rio, Ibtihaj Muhammad fencing in a hijab made for a nice story, but it had nothing to do with why she was on the team.
To imply that the USOC has some sort of diversity quota is an insult to all those athletes who make the team. It totally disregards all the work they put in, all the hours of training, to achieve their goal of representing their country at the Olympics. Likewise, to suggest that the USOC cares more about having a diverse team than a competitive one shows how little he understands the Olympic mindset. The first thing everyone looks at is the medal count. The USOC chooses the team capable of bringing home the most medals. Plain and simple. The ethnicity, sexuality, age, etc., of the athletes are irrelevant.
Although, the Fox News guy did make one good point in his (since deleted) article. So I'll let him use his own words to contradict his entire point: "In the Olympics, let's focus on the winner of the race -- not the race of the winner." I couldn't agree more. They're all members of Team USA. That's all that matters to me.
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