We are still reeling in the wake of a 175-year conviction of a former Olympic doctor for charges of sexual assault against hundreds of his female patients. And beyond this monstrous revelation, North Korea has been jockeying — and succeeding, it seems — for a position at the games. At the same time Russia, the impetus for decades of rivalry with the U.S., might be barred from attending. What a year this is going to be!
Larry Nassar
In the year following the #MeToo revolution, over 150 women have come forward with accusations against physician Larry Nassar. The former Olympic doctor, convicted initially on child pornography charges, spent seven days in the courtroom reliving his monstrous actions through the testimonies of his victims. This horrific case of medical malpractice and abuse of trust finds Nassar facing 175 years in prison.
How this will impact the integrity of the Olympics itself remains unclear. We can all hope that Nassar’s is an isolated case, but with the landslide of women breaking the silence after years of bearing sexual assault silently, it’s likely more athletes will come forward.
This is a monumental shift and one that’s long overdue as far as women’s right issues today goes. However, the Olympic committee will undoubtedly have its hands full with what to do in the aftermath, and further scandal could send shockwaves through the entire organization.
Russia
And then there’s Russia. As a New York Times headline aptly put it: “Russia is Barred from Winter Olympics. Russia Is Sending 169 Athletes to Winter Olympics.”
In other words, no one really knows what’s going on here. While the Olympic committee has banned Russia from attending the games on charges of widespread steroid abuse, the country has sent 169 “individual competitors” who are supposedly in no way associated with the Russian government, and who will compete entirely for their own validation.
The Russian flag will be absent from Pyeongchang, and all competitors — particularly those athletes from (but not for) Russia — must undergo a rigorous steroid screening. There is also the ever-looming possibility of convoluted cheating — as seen four years ago — bribery or other back-door shenanigans.
Regardless of what happens with Russia, following last year’s drug mishaps, the games will likely include increased testing and supervision of all athletes, and we can’t discount the possibility that another nation will face the same punishment as Russia, further stirring the proverbial pot.
North Korea
It feels like just days ago Kim Jong Un was calling for the annihilation of the South with purifying heavenly fire or something. Now, as though by magic, the two countries marched into the stadium together, under a single flag.
This is all very nice if one forgets that the two nations are — technically — still at war with one another. The end of 2017 also marked a clear deterioration in relations between North Korea and the U.S., as well as all U.S. allies. South Korea has the misfortune of sitting simultaneously at the top of that list, and just south of, well, North Korea.
So while nobody knows why this sudden move towards reunification emerged, it certainly has us guessing. Just one more unknown for this year’s Olympics.
Sh*t Show?
There’s no way to tell if all the controversy surrounding the Olympics this year will have any effect on the games. Probably not. But all the drama certainly has me curious. I’ve always been a tad superstitious, and it feels like a little too much bad juju. But who knows? Maybe the Russian/not Russian athletes will strictly adhere to the anti-doping protocol of the sport, along with all their friendly competitors. Maybe North Korea won’t do anything outrageous, and a lasting and harmonious peace will settle across the region. Then again. Maybe not.
Would this be the wrong time to make a joke about Norovirus turning it into a literal shitshow?Report
(Sarcasm on) The Olympic Committee would gladly let you know that Dr. Nassar’s activities do not disparage the 2017 Winter Olympics in South Korea because gymnastics is a summer Olympics event. (Sarcasm off).Report
Consensus view: What was the last Olympics, Summer or Winter, that was not some manner of shitshow?Report
2012 London? 2010 Vancouver? 2002 Salt Lake City?Report
Not London. Lots of shitshow news about London at the time, and that’s also tainted in retrospect by Nassar, since he seems to have been at his abusive heights back then.Report
The London Olympics are the only one I have personally attended, and I can’t think of anything better conducted while it was going on (*). It was an absolute joy, made better by tens of thousands of volunteers making not only the venues but every lonely tube station of bus stop ready to direct people in their way to venues miles away, and by the friendly attitude of the Londoners, who cheerfully welcomed and tolerated hordes of strangers invading their city.
The only snafu that was widely noted was the failure by sponsors to fill in plenty of seats given to them at the Opening. The uproar resulted in a daily raffle at 6 pm of all sponsor unused tickets (a lot) for the following day. Which I found an elegant solution.
(*) I’m talking about the actual games, not whatever happened during the years of ….preparation? (**)
Masterfully memorialized by Hugh Bonneville in BBC’s gem Twenty Twelve https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty_Twelve (***)
(***) which you all must see if you haven’t. Title notwithstanding, it’s timeless. It could have been called “Minus Three Hundred Eighty Five”, be set in Olympia, and carry the same punch.Report
The only thing I watch in the Summer Games are some of the fencing events. London’s streaming coverage was magnificent: every minute of every bout, streams never broke down, easy to navigate site, easy to find out who was fencing when. They were streaming the common feed that went to all countries, with no announcers or color commentators. Each point was shown from behind the referee, then shown again in close up slow motion from one of two angles. Whoever was choosing which angle to use for the slow motion shot did a terrific job of getting the one that showed the touch.
Serious about the “every minute” part. The Korean woman who lost her chance to fence for gold due to the referee’s errors was shown for the entire hour she sat on the edge of the strip waiting for the FIE to go through the motions of an appeal. (The FIE wasted everyone’s time; everyone who knew the rules knew that it was not an appealable decision.)
In 2016, the organizers broke pretty much everything that was good about the 2012 streaming coverage.Report
385 Olympia.Report
I was leaning toward SLC, but Vancouver and London weren’t bad, all things considered (Vancouver had an athlete killed in a training event, so that stuck out for me).
now Sochi…Report
@oscar-gordon @michael-cain @j_a
I had no concerns over how the London games were presented, but more with all the drama before them. Given that “concerns and controversies” for that games have their own, quite lengthy wikipedia page…. I’m not buying it as a non-shitshow.
Sure was pretty on TV though.
(My concerns almost all fell under the first section of that page, stuff that happened before the Games even started, as well as some other fairly local concerns. I had a very good friend living there at the time, which probably inflected my view.)Report
Yeah, so it seems Russia is competing inside a loophole you can drive a truck (with a dashcam) through.
Worse, they are able to compete as coherent teams (like the skate yesterday), instead of in a group with all the stateless athletes.Report
Oh Jeez. It’s the Olympics.
I’m not ready.
I just wanted to watch some curling.Report
I know I should have seen the favorable North Korean coverage coming.
But I didn’t.Report
At least some of the problem was people assuming that an anodyne Tweet would necessarily mean that the underlying article would leave out key context like that North Korea is a Stalinist hellhole run by a deranged personality cult.
Whether the problem is people jumping to that conclusion, or editorial decisions about how to write headlines, or terrible management of MSM orgs’ social media accounts, is another question, one which I have no answer for.Report
It’s not only CNN that is going for clickbait in the headline and concessions of excesses in paragraph 6.
Would that it were.Report
I rarely directly consume news; I just pretend to know what’s going on based on what people are saying about it on the Twitters.Report
I rarely directly consume news
Are you an outlier on this, do you think?
I don’t think you are.Report
Well, I’m a misanthropic shut in.
I expect most people get misinformed by human beings that they actually talk to.Report
The take machine by now has gone round the world and back again.
There are people I respect that are currently at the level of anti-anti-anti.
(I.e. western outlets are *not* lauding nor normalizing the Kim regime, but rather reporting a successful propoganda effort by them)
Eta and there are people i dont respect on the anti-anti-anti-anti-anti take, who are the proletariat of whataboutism.Report
“Lauding” is the wrong term.
But do some word switching in there and see how the headlines read when your ideological opponents have their names swapped in and the Norks swapped out.Report
“Sure, what I said isn’t accurate, but work with me here until what I’m saying *IS*, OK?”Report
@stillwater We do all do that from time to time…Report
I was disagreeing with his word, not mine.Report
I wasn’t sure if here was mindless diversions no politics rules, but since it doesn’t seem to be –
What ever happened to “no-platforming”?
(for that matter, whatever happened to sucker punching people in the face?)Report
Because it’s the Olympics and whatnot, I suppose I can understand the deliberate editorial choice to not focus on North Korea’s human rights abuses.
But the whole “Look at the North Korean cheerleaders! Aren’t they just adorable?!?” thing is… well. It’s obtuse.Report
@kolohe (It’s totally not, btw. One figures no-politics Olympics can go on Sunday thread, if there’s folks looking for that?)Report
I know I should have seen the favorable North Korean coverage coming.
Here’s a better question: did you foresee rightwingers almost univocally condemning the media for *not* univocally condemning NK? I’ve read many hot-takes from pretty bog-standard conservatives equating praise for KJUs sister as an endorsement of gulags. Yikes! Really???
Of course, I get that it’s a chicken cart/egg horse situation, but conceptually, not causally. Pick your conceptual scheme and the devastating criticisms flow without having to put in any thought whatsoever.Report
Tell me more about this egg horse… may be onto something there…Report
He was the guy who played his first game the same day as Lou Gehrig played his, but got injured in the 3rd inning and never played again.Report
The egg horse pulled the egg man’s cart. He’s the walrus.Report
did you foresee rightwingers almost univocally condemning the media for *not* univocally condemning NK?
In not gaming out the North Korean coverage, I failed to game out responses to it.
That said, for any sentence that involves whether it’s a safe bet whether it’ll be the case that “rightwingers almost univocally condemning the media for X” (or “not X”, I suppose), the assumption should usually be “yeah, they’re probably going to do that”.
And it’s a lot nicer when the rightwingers sound like crackpots.Report
Lots of right wingers sympathize with the NK cheerleaders, who are apparently treated almost as badly as American gymnasts.Report
I understand that the US tortures people too.Report
I’ve come around to wondering why the tone of North Korea coverage is important.
This isn’t an ironic question: I jumped in on the assumption that it was really important.
But then I started wondering what was at stake. And now I don’t have a clear answer.Report
It’s not. It’s a sporting event and being reported as that. They are avoiding the controversies as much as they can which is to be expected from a televised sports event. If it was important i’d care a heckva lot more about the South Korean’s reactions. I’ve seen a little about that.Report
@pillsy To me, on the one hand it’s not that important, but on the other hand it’s … vaguely morally obscene (cognitive dissonance between “vague” and “obscene” very deliberate) to coo over how charming and adorable a bunch of people are, how great it is that they’re getting along with the South Koreans, etc etc etc, when you *know* they’re probably only here because the alternative is starving to death. Or similar.
I mean.
It’s not *important* but it’s distracting as all hell…Report
Yea, it strikes me as specifics really mattering.
There are surely athletes from problematic countries whose presence at the Games is likely little different than most other athletes.
And there are athletes from problematic countries whose presence at the Games is VERY different from most other athletes.
And there may even be athletes from non-problematic countries whose presence at the Games is more like that second group than the first group but we might not even know.Report
What’s at stake? For me, part of the stakes are knowing that I’ll be reading news stories edited by the same people who wrote these headlines.
It’s pretty tawdry.Report
In a vaguely analogous vein, here’s this story that made it to the front page of Reddit:
NBC fires Olympic analyst after comments infuriate South Korea
What comments could he possibly have said?, I hear you ask.
Wait, what?, I hear you ask.
Well, I sort of skipped over the very first paragraph in the story. It sets up the context:
Report
I was wondering who that guy was during the opening ceremony. I’m not sure why they needed a generic rich nitwit for political commentary, i mean, don’t they have tom friedman’s number. That is his bailiwick.Report
He’s a bit more than generic nitwit – he’s a CEO of Kissinger’s consulting firm name brand nitwit.Report
@jaybird I had no wait what. I had an “OH NO, I can’t believe he said that.”
Without the hint paragraph.
The bad blood there lies deep, and for understandable reasons. It also goes back a lot further than just the last century.
It’s not *not* analogous to saying the same thing about Britain if you were in County Cork.Report
That’s a strong point. @trumwill found a good thread on teh Twitters that is in a similar vein.Report
That’s a good thread.Report
I still think that the Summer Olympics should be permanently based in Athens and the Winter Olympics in some cold mountainous country. Switzerland, Japan, or Korea would do.Report
@leeesq
Yes, but that would undermine the eternal boondoggle that is the true Olympic spirit.Report
To bad money making schemes aren’t an Olympic Sport.Report
BOR-RING. FIFA World Cup and IOC would always get silver and gold.Report
If we expand it to cover all sorts of money making schemes, I’m sure we can find competition.Report
Back in the day, it used to be easy to feel sorry for the Russian athletes and hope for them to successfully defect.
I’m not sure whether I feel that way about the North Koreans, or whether I am more worried about what a rash of successful defections might incur. (I suspect SK isn’t going to let them do that, so it’s kind of moot.)Report
Thats an interesting observation. Eastern Bloc defections tended to be in small numbers because as bad as the Eastern Bloc countries where, they tended to be livable. Major incidents weren’t going to break out over a couple of defections. North Korea is not a livable place and its not going to look good when nearly the entire North Korea Olympic delegation decides to defect. The Kim Dynasty is also one of the ideologically nuttier ones and isn’t going to take mass defections well.Report
My understanding is compared to USSR, Warsaw pact or Cuban defectors, the consequences for the defector’s family remaining behind is a lot more severe.
Also apparently, ROK government doesn’t want to deal with the fallout from defections during the next couple of weeks.Report
@kolohe Yeah, that’s my understanding as well. It just puts me in a weird position as a spectator (something I realize is utterly trivial compared to their and their families’ potential suffering).
Hard not to be aware that on some level what I’m watching isn’t that different from the Hunger Games…Report
I’m curious about how defections play out.
Imagine someone wants to defect. How, exactly, does their home country stop them that doesn’t risk violating a law of some kind? If I’m a North Korean athlete and I say, “I’m not getting on that plane,” and two burly North Korean guys pick me up and try to carry me onto the plane… isn’t that kidnapping? Or would NK enlist whatever local folks to actually carry me onto the plane?Report
@kazzy I’m not totally sure either, it’s been so long since the ones I remember best.
I did find this article just now: https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/09/asia/north-korea-olympic-defection-fears-intl/index.html – I haven’t read it but planning to do so later.Report
Thanks, @maribou . That was actually the article that got me thinking about it. It focuses on three things: who is chosen to go in the first place, “surveillance” and “scrutiny back home”. What it seems to be dancing around or simply not discussing is how anything is actually enforced. It mentions never being left alone, even being supervised in the bathroom. But what happens if you try to go out the window? Are there three burly folks out there with their arms folded blocking your way but not actually touching you? Are they whispering, “How’s mom? Maybe we should pay her a visit?” Or is someone inside grabbing you by the ankles, ignoring and/or immune from the sorts of laws that would usually land you in jail for such actions?
This also stood out:
“The athletes have made their presence known by hanging from a window a massive North Korean flag that covers all three floors. Such a move that could land you in jail on a normal day, but these Olympic Games are not normal and the flag is allowed by the International Olympic Committee.”
I’m assuming that they are referring to a “normal day” in South Korea (I can imagine reasons why hanging even the NK flag in NK would be illegal as the government may want to control ALL displays of EVERYTHING… but that doesn’t fit with the way the passage is written)… which A) paints an interesting picture of SK, outlawing the (public?) hanging of the NK flag and B) shows that some laws change during the Olympics. How exactly that is gone about is unexplained.
Which sort of goes to @jaybird ‘s original point… they’re talking about how a brutal regime prevents defection and make it sound more like a school field trip than what I’d imagine a brutal regime preventing defection would sound like.Report