Crying Shame
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Watching the Olympic medal ceremony for Women's Individual Foil. The medalists are on the platform and they take their medals from a tray...No Olympic official will place the medal on their neck. They turn to face their nation's flags and The Star Spangled Banner begins to play.
You can see the tears in the corner of the gold medalist's eyes. You can see her face work, as she sings along with her country's national anthem. This is a pinnacle moment in her life. A moment she has worked, sweated and sacrificed for.
Shame you can't see her face or the faces of the silver and bronze medalists. Those faces are covered with masks that obscure almost half of their faces.
It's idiocy. A crying shame. These competitors have been rigorously screened for COVID and are being tested every day. Let the woman have her ceremony without having to blot her face from view. There are no crowds for the ceremony. Nobody not screened, that can be infected.
We have lost our minds.
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It’s good enough to know that you have done your best, there is no good to come from being anxious over external validation or lack thereof. She can always pose for additional photographs and videos without face covering and with her medal after the event.
If you ask the Japanese on the streets, most of them would rather the Olympic Games not take place at all while the pandemic is still raging in Japan.
For a very long time, the Olympic Games prohibited professional sports people from competing. Olympic competitors were supposed to be amateurs with a life outside of sports. It’s neither healthy nor prudent to put one’s entire life and aspiration into just one sporting event. There will be other fencing competitions, there will be other opportunities to compete with other excellent fencers. There are friends and loved ones. There are other worlds outside of fencing, outside of competitions, outside of sports.
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You really don't have a clue, do you?
Always remember, Operation Valkyrie was an act of sedition.
Warning: I post things that interest me. Read and comment at your own discretion. -
Please raise your hand if there is an Olympic medalist in your family or your spouse's. If not, raise your hand if you know an Olympic medalist very well.
For those who raised their hands, have you ever heard them talk about what their medal meant to them? How hard they trained to reach that level of their sport? What it meant to stand on that medal platform?
Always remember, Operation Valkyrie was an act of sedition.
Warning: I post things that interest me. Read and comment at your own discretion. -
@jolly Sure. I get your point from the athlete’s angle.
But there was a non-zero chance of the games getting cancelled again, and it is a political turd for the Japanese right now.
I’m sure many athletes are just happy the games are actually happening.
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@jolly said in Crying Shame:
Please raise your hand if there is an Olympic medalist in your family or your spouse's. If not, raise your hand if you know an Olympic medalist very well.
For those who raised their hands, have you ever heard them talk about what their medal meant to them? How hard they trained to reach that level of their sport? What it meant to stand on that medal platform?
And forever more the pictures of that incredible moment will be marred by the masks. It's a damn shame.
“I am fond of pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.” ~Winston S. Churchill
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I thought nobody cared about the olympics, or was that just last week?
I guess anything that means we can complain about masks can't be that unimportant.
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I dunno.
- Sports are inherently inspirational. Sorry if you don't think so, but you get no conversational brownie points for being out of touch with your own culture.
- Sports are inherently inspirational, and therefore so are athletes. What they do publicly makes us aspire to be as great as they are at their best. Again, sorry if you don't believe athletes should be role models, because they are anyway. Nobody cares what you think.
- Considering these, I suppose you could argue that the mask-wearing further normalizes their use. Showing that they aren't above wearing them could be a kind of public service. Because yes I do believe masks are a good thing and while that's only an opinion, no I don't care if you disagree.
Aside: Olympic athletes—many of them anyway—have crap immune systems.
I can see a case to be made for the masks. But I dunno, I also think #3 above is a bit of a stretch. We're too selfish to even admit to the existence of role models anymore.
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@doctor-phibes said in Crying Shame:
I thought nobody cared about the olympics, or was that just last week?
I guess anything that means we can complain about masks can't be that unimportant.
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Which is worse, missing funerals, canceling weddings, losing your job, losing family members, or having to wear a mask while you collect your medal?
We've lost our minds alright.
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Wrong topic.
Always remember, Operation Valkyrie was an act of sedition.
Warning: I post things that interest me. Read and comment at your own discretion. -
@mik said in Crying Shame:
And forever more the pictures of that incredible moment will be marred by the masks. It's a damn shame.
I dunno . . . making it to the platform, even more making it to the center platform, means a lot more than how the pictures turn out, I would think. Getting there, mask politics or no mask politics, might be thought too enormous to be marred by the photo op.
I don't know.
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There is only that one picture, that one piece of videotape. A crystallized one moment in time.
You know that part of the ceremony where the minister or official says, "You may now kiss the bride" and the photographer snaps that picture? You can recreate it. You can do it over again. But it will never happen again.
Ever.
Always remember, Operation Valkyrie was an act of sedition.
Warning: I post things that interest me. Read and comment at your own discretion. -
@doctor-phibes said in Crying Shame:
Which is worse, missing funerals, canceling weddings, losing your job, losing family members, or having to wear a mask while you collect your medal?
We've lost our minds alright.
Because we can’t discuss a particular application of a mask rule, without extrapolating to a blanket notion of whether COVID is bad for people and whether we should have empathy for that.
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@doctor-phibes said in Crying Shame:
Which is worse, missing funerals, canceling weddings, losing your job, losing family members, or having to wear a mask while you collect your medal?
We've lost our minds alright.
Empathetic bastard, aren't you?
It's a closed room, no audience, everyone tested out the whazoo. And just a few minutes to hours before, that athlete was competing without a mask. You don't think they can take the damn thing off for 180 seconds for maybe the most important moment of their lives?
Always remember, Operation Valkyrie was an act of sedition.
Warning: I post things that interest me. Read and comment at your own discretion. -
@horace said in Crying Shame:
@doctor-phibes said in Crying Shame:
Which is worse, missing funerals, canceling weddings, losing your job, losing family members, or having to wear a mask while you collect your medal?
We've lost our minds alright.
Because we can’t discuss a particular application of a mask rule, without extrapolating to a blanket notion of whether COVID is bad for people and whether we should have empathy for that.
Having to wear a mask for a medal ceremony pales into insignificance next to a lot of the other things that have happened because of Covid.
And last week many of us were saying how little we care about the olympics. What changed?
Suddenly, there's something to talk about, and it isn't even the actual sport? It's masks. The never-ending saga of masks. This isn't about the olympics at all. It's about masks.
