Global Brotherhood?
As much as these winter Olympic games provided lots of wonderful and thrilling moments, I think the legacy of these games will still be the preventable death of a 21-year-old Georgian luger and IOC President Jacques Rogge doing his best Avery Brundage impersonation. It cast a slight pall over the games before they even started. I say "slight pall" because the media attention considerably waned as the games went on these past two weeks.
On ESPN Radio's "Mike & Mike" this morning, the question was raised, "if the luger killed was from the USA, would the tone of the games and its coverage be different?" The sentiment was YES, because an American luger's death would've generated much more and more constant media attention. It's a shame to think that a young man's death was progressively treated as a media afterthought because of his geographic home.
This is the one thing I don't think we as fans keep in mind enough when it comes to Olympic competition, it's a global competition for everyone and their nations. It's all well and good to cheer "USA USA!" or sing the Canadian national anthem, but sometimes I wonder if people from some nations forget that the Olympics aren't only about their nation. National pride is one thing, borderline jingoism is another. To mentally sweep the death of an athlete because he wasn't a citizen or resident of the home country or a media-centric nation like ours leaves a little stain, reminding us of past Olympics marred.
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