2022 Bejing Winter Olympics

[bubblesort]

The winter olympics haven't gotten much buzz because, I mean, they're held in China, where they are committing genocide, and the past few Olympics have been crap, anyway. It's been consistently downhill ever since Brazil's apocalympics, in 2016. I don't think I know anybody who is watching them even casually this time. My friends usually get into curling, but this year nobody even cares about curling.

EDIT: If you want to see a bunch of problems with the 2022 Bejing Olympics, the 2016 Apocalympics subreddit is still going strong, with all kinds of images of the bizarre life situations the athletes over there are putting up with. For example, this is Finland's dorm. It's not clear whether that's a goat or a deer or something behind the fire extinguisher waterfall.
END EDIT

There are a few stories that annoy me enough to post about, though. Here's one:

MSN

So this 15 year old girl is "competing" for the Russian Olympic Committee, not Russia! Russia can not compete because of their long history of doping scandals. So they let Russian citizens compete, but athletes representing the country of Russia were banned back in 2017. That did not stop the Russian Olympic Committee athletes from illegally displaying their Russian flags at the opening ceremonies this year, though. They were not sanctioned for flagrantly breaking the rules at the opening ceremonies.

Anyway, back to the 15 year old: She was doping. For... figure skating?

Yeah, yeah, figure skating is probably difficult and all that, but it's really just dancing with ice skates on. There's only one drug I know of that makes me better at dancing and that's alcohol. She's 15, but she's Russian, so, like... don't we expect her to be drinking vodka at 15? Don't Russians drink vodka like the French drink wine? Like, they give it to toddlers and stuff, right?

So anyway, they have this stupid rule about 'performance enhancing substances' or something, and this girl absolutely 100% broke the rule. It doesn't matter how dumb a rule is, you can't win if you break the rules of a game. That's what separates games and sports from investment banking. So they kick her out, right?

NO! They give her first place!

LOL, that's absurd. It's no longer a game at that point. When you let people break rules like that, it's not a contest of skill any more, it's just people handing out medals to their buddies. They say they gave her a break because she's 15, which is the most arbitrary thing in the world to me. If she's too young to break rules, she's too young to compete on the international stage. Can you imagine if during the superbowl, the referee was all "I saw you were face mask holding, but I'm going to let it slide, because you're 26 years old." That's not how it works! In the superbowl, the referee has to act like they didn't see the foul. They can't see the foul, but then make an exception for their buddies.

I think at the next olympics, they should just skip all the expensive athletic-looking pageantry, and just have a ceremony, instead. The ceremony will consist of Russians pounding vodka, then dancing around on ice, and then, the olympic representative gives them all solid gold medals, for being whatever age they happen to be. Put their ages on the medals, to remind them how they earned them.

The point I'm making is this:

The Russian Olympic Committee athletes are all lying cheaters who will never win anything, because they're a bunch of vodka pounding, alcoholic losers, and the only person more pathetic than them in the whole entire world is China's president Xi, who can't deal with a bit of free speech, without resorting to genocide.

 

[Aribeth Zelin]

Okay, so real quick, if its booze, its like the Russian soft drink, Kvas [which is sort of a really weak beer drink, I think]

But yes, I am not watching the olympics - their racism, sexism, etc is blatant.

And their lack of doing anything to protect the 15 yr old from what's obviously an abusive trainer/athelete relationship.

 

[bubblesort]

I just edited the OP to add that the 2016 apocalympic subreddit is still going strong with stories from the 2022 Bejing winter olympics.

That's where I found this picture, of Finland's olympic dormitory. I think that's a goat on the left hand side. Maybe a cow? IDK

 

[Ghost Pepper]

I've maybe have watched about an hour of the Olympics over the last 8 years or so. Usually it's just passing by with every once in awhile watching for a few minutes.

 

[Aribeth Zelin]

I stopped watching when it was still every four years

 

[Khamon]

Is it not still every four years? The last time I remember paying any attention was watching Louganis dive in 1984. Which god do they honor now?

 

[Casey Pelous]

[Long screed about Russia.]

Casey: *buzzes in just before contestant #2* "Is it 'what are some cheap ethnic slurs?'"

Ghost of Alex Trebek: "No, I'm sorry Casey, we were looking for "what is an example of stereotyping? Stereotyping." *Condescending just a little* "I would have thought you'd know that."

Casey: *fumes silently*

 

[Free]

The ghost of Alex Trebek is lookin' pretty good. You know, for a ghost.

 

[bubblesort]

Casey: *buzzes in just before contestant #2* "Is it 'what are some cheap ethnic slurs?'"

Ghost of Alex Trebek: "No, I'm sorry Casey, we were looking for "what is an example of stereotyping? Stereotyping." *Condescending just a little* "I would have thought you'd know that."

Casey: *fumes silently*

Hey now... they aren't representing Russia. That would be wrong. Only real athletes get to represent real countries.

They are people who represent the Russian Olympic Committee. That's a totally different thing. Alcoholics who impersonate athletes get to represent committees, not countries.

 

[Aribeth Zelin]

Is it not still every four years? The last time I remember paying any attention was watching Louganis dive in 1984. Which god do they honor now?

No, but I get why and it makes sense.

Now the Winter olympics are every four years, then in between, the Summer ones are every four years.

Its done that way so that countries in the Southern Hemisphere can -also- host and not have a problem with both being at the same time.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Some might have noticed me not posting about the Olympics this year, when I'm usually all over the Games when they happen. Well, a lot of it is because I am extremely unhappy with the hosts and the IOC and with the Russian team like usual. I haven't even been watching it, like, at all. And I'm not the only one; NBC reported that viewership for this Games is historically low, across all of its platforms.

So I haven't been keeping track of the various individual good and bad moments. But when I read about what happened tonight, I had to see it for myself, and then I had to post it here. Tonight was the last portion of the individual figure skating medal event, the free-skate portion.

You've probably heard just because it's been a matter of international news that Russia's best women's figure skater, and arguably the best female figure skater in the world before tonight, Kamila Valieva, recently was involved in a scandal after one of her pre-Olympic event drug tests showed she had doped, using a special heart medication - which was sadly predictable because the Russian Olympic Team dopes its star athletes as a matter of institutional policy (and that isn't even a controversial statement). WADA and IOC suspended her from the Games but the Court of Arbitration for Sport bizarrely canceled the suspension because it would cause vague "irreparable damage"...to Valieva herself, or the Russian team, or the event, or some damn thing - honestly, I didn't even read it, because again I'm avoiding press coverage of this Olympics for the most part. Bottom line is, Valieva was pretty much the presumptive individual gold medalist by a convincing margin and everyone knew it, and according to some people kicking her out of the event and depriving the best figure skater in the world of a gold medal for cheating even though she definitely cheated would've been "unfair".

Which, I mean, objectively - yeah, it's unfair to Valieva. She's 15 years old. She didn't dope because she wanted to, and she wouldn't have been able to procure something like that specialized heart medication to do it on her own even if she did. She took it because the Russian Olympic Team made her take it. It was her coaches' fault and responsibility. But you can't punish "coaches" in a way that doesn't also punish the athletes anyway whose coaches they are, so the end result is that nobody whatsoever is held accountable. So whatever, she was let back in, and remained the presumptive gold medalist - although the IOC said they would not hold a medal ceremony if she won. And it looked like that's what was going to happen; coming into tonight she was comfortably in first place in the individual so far.

And then tonight happened. And, welp. After weeks of stress, pressure, and lack of support from her team, Valieva skated shockingly poorly in her final event, falling several times, and scored so badly she wound up in 4th place overall.

And what happened at that point was just a mess. It was the worst freaking thing I've ever seen coming out of an Olympic event.


The girl in that photo is Anna Shcherbakova, the gold medalist from Russia. She's sitting in the green room, alone, after learning she's won. No coaches, no teammates, nobody there to be happy for her, or even indicate that they particularly care that she's just won a freaking Olympic gold medal for her country.

If you want to know why that's the case, well. Read this.

 

[Aribeth Zelin]

I am -not- a fan of competitive sports - and I really do not think we should be putting kids into this situation - or any other lesser situation like this.

 

[bubblesort]

The girl in that photo is Anna Shcherbakova, the gold medalist from Russia. She's sitting in the green room, alone, after learning she's won. No coaches, no teammates, nobody there to be happy for her, or even indicate that they particularly care that she's just won a freaking Olympic gold medal for her country.

That photo reminds me of the Fifteen Million Merits episode of Black Mirror. I can't tell if they are trying to be as dystopian as possible, or if it is just hard to cover up how dystopian the situation is.

 

[Casey Pelous]

So the world is shocked, shocked I say!, to learn that there is ungodly pressure on Olympic skaters and that they are basically pumped full of a carefully timed regimen of drugs and treated like performing meat?

Holy crap, wait till they find out about what's been going on in, just to pick one at random, gymnastics for, like, ever .....

At least it is only in Russia, AMIRITE??????

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

No, I don't think it's the case that the world is shocked to find out that children in sports are abused, as a general thing. And of course nobody thinks that only the Russian team is doing it.

But it can't be denied that nothing this....I don't know, blatant?...has happened before at the Olympics. Athletes have had emotional breakdowns leading to losses before, but I've never seen a coach berate them for it in front of the cameras; athletes have thrown tantrums over winning silver before, but I've never seen a team so completely dysfunctional that it neglects its own gold medal winner because she wasn't the one who was "supposed" to get it. I've never heard a post-event interview with a gold medal winner in which they describe feeling "empty" inside. And it certainly seems like nobody else has either. What was witnessed last night was on a whole other level.