Faster, Stronger, Dumber

So far the XXX Olympiad has been going pretty smoothly. The United States and China, the obvious big deal countries with two of the largest populations are, predictably, neck and neck in the medal count. Hell bent for leather “work ethic” Japan is third at this point.

Every Olympics has to have a little controversy, sometimes large, sometimes trivial. This year started out with a couple of athletes getting the boot for behavior unrelated to their sports. They were thrown out of the games for sending out tasteless and offensive tweets. Lets hope that these are the last people on planet Earth who don’t know that when you put something on the internet for someone, you’ve sent it to everyone.

On a larger scale, the badminton teams from three countries were kicked out for sandbagging - intentionally trying to lose matches to gain a tactical advantage down the road. The only people who were more shocked by this than the people who didn’t know that badminton was an Olympic sport, were the people who didn’t know that badminton was a sport.

This statement is, of course, offensive to those nations where badminton is a big deal and the host country of Great Britain happens to be one of them. It seems that the guilty teams lack of effort was so transparent that blind corgis in the bleachers were booing. Obviously some countries have a lot to learn about being sneaky. Unfortunately, the countries that could give them some instruction in this area are sufficiently sneaky that we don’t know who they are.

In an act of contrition, the Chinese team and their coach apologized on Chinese television. In the spirit of forgiveness that the Chinese government is known for, team members have been allowed to keep their uniforms. In fact, officials are insisting that they wear them instead of HAZMAT suits in their new jobs cleaning up toxic waste sites.