The IOC Is Hypocritical, Craven, and Inept. Also, Water Is Wet.

Curmie initially intended to write about this year’s Winter Olympics in general.  He may do that down the road, but right now there’s one story that deserves its own post.  Skeleton slider Vladyslav Heraskevych was barred from competition because he insisted on wearing a helmet honoring his fellow Ukrainian athletes killed in the conflict with Russia in his homeland. 

You can see a photo of the offending headgear at the top of this page, Gentle Reader.  There’s nothing particularly controversial there, as far as Curmie is concerned.  There’s no text, and it’s not like there’s a photo of Vladimir Putin with a target on his forehead.  It’s a memorial, full stop.

But, you see, the organization that won’t allow athletes from Russia or Belarus to compete under their country’s banner doesn’t allow political expression.  Yeah, that makes sense.  ☹ The London Olympics in the summer of 2012 included a recognition of those killed in the 7/7 bombings in 2005, as well as a reminder of the Blitz.  The fact that NBC couldn’t be bothered to cover that part of the opening ceremony doesn’t change the fact that it happened.  Such expressions are indeed commonplace.

Of course, the majority of the headlines are about how Heraskevych “violated the rules” or some such nonsense.  That’s because journalism is dead.  The alleged transgression is of rule 50.2 of the Olympic Charter, which states that “no kind of demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda is permitted in any Olympic sites, venues or other areas.”  There’s a men’s figure skater who, according to NBC talking head Ashley Wagner, “becomes the Pope” at the end of his long program.  That’s not “propaganda,” but a helmet with a couple of photos of countrymen and -women is?  Give me a damned break.  Indeed, an over-zealous interpretation of the rule would prevent an athlete from wearing a cross or a Star of David to breakfast in the Olympic village.  Even the IOC isn’t that stupid, but it’s what the charter could be contorted into meaning.

The story is that the International Olympic Committee remains the quintessence of hypocritical waffling.  IOC President Kirsty Coventry’s statement is especially absurd: “It’s not about the messaging. It’s literally about the rules and the regulations and that, in this case, the field of play, we have to be able to keep a safe environment for everyone and sadly, that just means no messaging is allowed.”  Curmie awaits any rational argument that Heraskevych’s helmet affects the safety of literally anyone.  This expansion of the definition of safety is, alas, endemic, but that doesn’t make it reasonable.

It goes without saying that Ukrainians are virtually unanimous in support for Heraskevych.  Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s post on X is worth reading in its entirety, but he insists that “No rule has been broken,” and concludes his tweet (are they still called that?) with this: “We are proud of Vladyslav and of what he did. Having courage is worth more than any medal.”  Zelenskyy subsequently awarded Heraskevych their country’s highest civilian honor, the Order of Freedom.  (That link also includes the names of the 22 Ukrainian athletes memorialized on Heraskevych’s helmet.)

Of course, there’s a fair amount of posturing involved here.  Heraskevych wasn’t regarded as a medal contender, but now he’s one of the most talked-about athletes to have travelled to northern Italy of late.  Could he have accepted the “compromise” of wearing a black armband or something along those lines?  Sure.  But in refusing to compromise, he got a lot more attention.  Curmie has no idea whether Heraskevych’s intransigence was a function of integrity or publicity-seeking.  Either way, the IOC got clobbered by the Streisand Effect.  In attempting to suppress discussion of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, they called a lot more attention to it.  What would have been at most an isolated mini-protest by a single athlete became the stuff of international headlines.  Ukraine is appealing to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, and the Latvian coach is appealing the decision to the International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation.

Still, the emotion displayed by Coventry in discussing her unsuccessful attempt at talking Heraskevych down caught Curmie’s attention.  It’s unlikely that she’s an idiot… which means that we should pay attention when she says “No one, especially me, is disagreeing with the messaging; it’s a powerful message, it’s a message of remembrance, a message of memory, and no one is disagreeing with that.”  That seems to be very close indeed to an admission that there’s nothing really problematic about that helmet.  And that would mean that perhaps Coventry isn’t all that unhappy about all the publicity, even if it seems to put the IOC in a negative light… it might just be worth it.

Curmie doesn’t necessarily believe that, but even he can dream.

The Pearl-Clutching Podium

Curmie finds great amusement in the meme you see reproduced on the left.  He knew he’d seen the two women whose greatly magnified faces appeared above the water-line as boats carrying athletes to the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics passed by.  He got as far as presuming the images to have been from a painting in the Louvre, but he confesses that he couldn’t quite place them, and had given up the search through the memory bank until a friend from high school posted the meme.

Of course!  Curmie remembers seeing the painting in person over a half-century ago, possibly in the company of that friend; we were roommates on a spring break trip to London and Paris sponsored by the school’s French club.  Curmie saw it again a couple years later while on a college Language Study Abroad program, and photos have crossed his path a few times in the ensuing decades.  He’s mildly embarrassed that he didn’t immediately see the tweak (if you’ll pardon the expression, Gentle Reader) to the spectators, but mostly he’s still giggling over the pearl-clutchers’ inability to partake of the low-hanging fruit: the part of the portrait that is suggested but not seen is indeed a little risqué by American television standards.  The resounding silence from the American right is indeed ironic, especially in the context of what did get their collective skivvies in a twist.  

Most of the controversies arising out of this year’s Olympics had to do with actions, past or present, of the athletes: were the Chinese swimmers (still) doping, what should be done about the convicted child rapist, what the hell was that Australian woman doing, stuff like that.  A couple of stories were about how members of the media behaved.  And, of course, there was the Great Floor Exercise Debacle, in which most Americans thought Jordan Chiles was much abused based primarily on the fact that she is American and the other contenders for the bronze medal are not.

But none of these stories make it to the podium in the Olympic Pearl-Clutching finals.  To reach those lofty heights, a contender must claim victimization on the basis of something other than nationality, and the top scorers are not the athletes themselves, but television viewers, who must claim to have suffered mightily themselves.  The outrageousness of the outrage, not its reach, is what determines the winner.

We begin, then, with the bronze medalist, the furor over Algerian boxer Imane Khelif.  Yes, it was a bit ridiculous to make a big deal out of the fact that an athlete who competed as a woman in the Tokyo Olympics was allowed to do so again in Paris.  And yes, the Italian woman who initially accused her of being male recanted after the “agony of defeat” wore off. 

But we can’t rank this any higher than third place because there’s some very real mitigation.  Transgender women, those who went through puberty as males, are in fact likely to have better upper-body strength than women who were born female.  As Lia Thomas has amply demonstrated, mediocre or merely good male athletes can become stars by doing little more than declaring themselves female.  There was, of course, a fair amount of internet chatter (without evidence, of course) that Khelif is transgender.  Some of this came from despicable but somehow trusted folks like Elon Musk and J.K. Rowling, both of whom Khelif has sued for cyberbullying.

Curmie, an advocate for both free speech and victims’ rights, hasn’t completely wrapped his head around the legal issues.  What is definitely true is that Khelif is intersex, not trans.  A lot of the people who expressed outrage believed the false reports; we can raise an eyebrow at their willingness to think the likes of Musk are even capable of truth-telling, but we can’t blame them too much.  And the fact that she’s been beaten before doesn’t automatically mean she doesn’t have an advantage. 

Moreover, there is no standard means of dealing with such issues: should we be considering testosterone levels? the presence or absence of XY chromosomes? visible male dangly bits?  The Olympics apparently make their decisions based on what it says on a passport. 

Curmie has a friend whose passport says “male” even though it was issued to someone who was born female and had only just begun the transitioning process: I can’t speak to the details with confidence, but I’d bet that surgery hadn’t happened, and testosterone boosters had only just begun if in fact they’d begun at all.  If that’s what the process looked like in that direction, it’s doubtful that going the other direction would be much different.  And there are certainly countries which would be willing to (ahem) bend the rules if there were no criteria other than passports.

Moreover, Khelif was indeed disqualified from the 2023 World Championships after the fact by the Russian-controlled International Boxing Association for unspecified offenses totally unrelated to the fact that she had the audacity to beat a Russian boxer.  (Ahem.)  The IOC cut ties with the IBA and criticized that judgment, which they claimed was “sudden and arbitrary” and devoid of due process.  When you’re too corrupt for the IOC, you are definitely not the good guys in the story.

Still, we can understand those who are hesitant to advocate for Khelif in the absence of further evidence.  So these pearl-clutchers aren’t the champions of their event.  But the mere fact that the same people who insist that everyone should be permanently classified according to the sex they were assigned at birth are the ones howling that Khelif should not be allowed to compete… erm… according to the sex she was assigned at birth is enough to earn them a spot on the podium.

In the silver medal position is the weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth that accompanied the perception that there was a brief moment in the opening ceremony that someone decided had parodied the Last Supper… not the event, to be sure, but the painting.  Every pseudo-Christian yahoo with access to an X account or a Fox station was sore aggrieved, although it’s unclear whether people were actually offended or whether they dutifully pretended to be so when instructed by right-wing media.  And no, the fact that a lot of people purported to be offended does not mean there’s legitimacy to their claim.

The facts that there were a lot more people in the image than there were at the Last Supper, that there was no table, that the artist who created that particular vignette insisted it was intended to reference both the Greek origins of the Olympics and the notion of Dionysian (or, to use the Roman term, Bacchanalian) revelry: all this is to be ignored, apparently.  Even the Vatican got into the act, albeit belatedly, with this bizarre statement: “The Holy See was saddened by certain scenes at the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympic Games and cannot but join the voices raised in recent days to deplore the offense done to many Christians and believers of other religions [?!?]”  (emphasis added).

Curmie confesses that he didn’t know what the hell that moment was all about.  He didn’t think of Dionysus, although in retrospect that identification makes sense, but he fancies himself reasonably adept at understanding both cultural references and symbology, and never thought of the Last Supper, either.  It was just another in a series of rather strange vignettes that bespoke the avant-garde or, perhaps more specifically and relevantly, Frenchness. 

But let’s assume for the moment that Curmie was just asleep at the proverbial wheel on this one, and that the MAGA hordes were correct that DaVinci’s Last Supper was being referenced.  At the risk of rendering further offense, Curmie wonders, “So what?”  The Christian religion is not being parodied. 

First off, that would be a remarkably silly thing to do in a city whose principal tourist attractions include the cathedral of Notre Dame (it is an amazing space, and Curmie is very happy it will soon re-open), the chapel of Sainte-Chapelle, and the basilica of Sacré-Cœur.  But more to the point, there is nothing sacred about that painting.  A painting of a bunch of white guys all sitting on the same side of a long table isn’t likely to represent, even to believers, an accurate portrayal of a meal served a couple of millennia ago.  It’s on a religious theme; that’s it.  It would be only marginally sillier to have forbidden Curmie to cheer for his alma mater’s football team when we played the Holy Cross Crusaders.

There are, in fact, sacred relics in Paris.  When Curmie was last in that city, Sainte-Chapelle housed what they proclaimed to be the crown of thorns, a piece of the true cross, and so on.  (Those relics are now apparently housed in the Louvre.)  Make fun of those—or of items of similar significance to another religion—and you’re a first-class jackass, even if you’re “right” to doubt their authenticity.  But to suggest a pastiche of a painting obliquely and perhaps even unintentionally?  Seriously?  Your God is pretty much a wimp if he can’t handle that level of presumed disrespect.  And so, O Much-Abused Faux Christian, are you.

There’s no question that these folks deserve their silver medal.  But the fact that few observers immediately caught on to what was being represented, and that it’s merely a stretch as opposed to a fabrication to see the Last Supper referenced lends a pinch of legitimacy to the hand-wringers.  Despite their over-enthusiastic clamor, therefore, they don’t get the gold medal.

Remember, it’s the outrageousness of the paranoia, not the extent to which it gained traction, that earns points in the battle for the pearl-clutching gold.  The top of the podium is therefore reserved for those who gasped at the demonic figure in the closing ceremony.  

It is, as Curmie recognized immediately, and suspects you did, as well, Gentle Reader, a replica of the Winged Victory of Samothrace.  You can see the original here, to the right.  It strikes me as a particularly apt usage, combining the notion of victory, certainly relevant to the competitions of the previous couple of weeks, with the Olympics’ origins in Greece (Samothrace is a Greek island), with the host city (the statue has been on display in the Louvre for about a century and a half). 

It is certainly one of the most famous statues in the world.  What’s better known?  Well, the Venus de Milo, Rodin’s Thinker, Michelangelo’s David, Christ the Redeemer overlooking Rio de Janeiro, the Statue of Liberty… and maybe something else that’s slipping Curmie’s mind right now.  But it’s certainly in the top ten in the world. 

Ah, but not to the proudly ignorant X user Carolann, who asserts that it is a “headless, and armless Angel with what appears to be an effigy of Lucifer (The Golden Voyager) standing in gold. Certainly a fitting close to the MOST demonic & satanic Olympics in history.”  Needless to say, there are followers who say that it is “a slap in the face to all Christians” and similar hogwash. 

Someone points out what virtually anyone with a modicum of cultural literacy knows (or at the very least suspects), but our gal Carolann responds with the classic “we can see what it is from here.”  It is impossible to argue with such idiots.  Evidence means nothing to them.  Only two things enter their minds: chauvinistic hatred and the quest for victimhood.

The latter used to be the sole preserve (or nearly so) of the so-called underprivileged or disenfranchised, whose failures are to be excused because of their demographic profile: hence, for example, criticisms of Kamala Harris’s politics or performance, even if deserved, are dismissed as racist or sexist or both.  But now the (pseudo-) Christian right is demanding their place in the Victimhood Hall of Fame, despite the lack of anyone actually doing anything to even inconvenience them.

The good news is that this particular hallucination doesn’t seem to have generated much of a following, but the mere fact that someone could go on the record with such paranoid ramblings about imaginary threats to an already privileged position is somewhere between chilling and terrifying.  Yes, the MAGA cultists are weird.

La la, how the life goes on.

Incompetence and Arrogance of Olympian Proportions

 

The three women you see pictured at the top of the page, Gentle Reader, currently stand in the third (i.e., bronze medal), fourth, and fifth positions in the Olympics final in the women’s floor exercise. You see them from top to bottom in their relative positions as Curmie writes this; whether those will be the final rankings remains to be seen.

Anyway, from the top down we see Romania’s Ana Bărbosu and Sabrina Maneca-Voinea, and the US’s Jordan Chiles.  Each of them has reason to believe that she—and she alone—should be the bronze medalist.  But a series of judges’ fuck-ups (sorry, Gentle Reader, there is no other term) have turned what should have been an easy ranking into a brouhaha that makes clear that whatever the NCAA or FIFA may do, the IOC isn’t going to give up its title of Most Corrupt and Incompetent Sports Organization without a fight.  But wait!  Who’s that coming up on the outside?  It’s the Tribunal Arbitral du Sport (Court of Arbitration for Sport), or TAS,  staking their claim, and they’re backing it up with hubristic posturing!  It’s coming down to the wire, Gentle Reader, and it’s anyone’s race!

Curmie has already made clear his distaste for sports which rely on the subjective opinions of judges rather than on some objective criterion.  Yes, referees can make mistakes, but at least we know that the team that scores the most points will win, as will the swimmer who touches the wall first.  In these events, it’s clear: the US won a gold medal in the 100m sprint because a photograph made it clear that Noah Lyles’s torso crossed the finish line .005 seconds before Kishane Thompson’s did.  The US women’s basketball team also narrowly won gold, beating the French team by a single point.

Those close finishes seem more arbitrary when there’s no objective way of distinguishing between the performances.  It’s also true that gymnastics is second only to figure skating in terms of judges giving credit to established stars just because they’re established. 

But let’s assume for the moment that the judges’ votes, though subjective, were both informed and honest.  The point that if you were to ask a dozen experts which of the three women discussed here was the “best,” suggesting that all three would get at least two votes apiece is both accurate and irrelevant.  These women didn’t go to Paris to get a participation trophy.

OK, so what happened?  By the time Chiles, the last to do her routine, hit the floor, the gold and silver medals were de facto wrapped up by Rebecca Andrade and Simone Biles, but the bronze was very much up in the air.  Bărbosu  and Maneca-Voinea were tied on points, with the former placed third because her execution score was higher.  Chiles performed well, but came up just short, with a score of 13.666, behind the two Romanian women’s 13.700.  But American coach Cecile Landi submitted an inquiry about Chiles’s difficulty score.  Less than a minute after Chiles’s score was posted, the appeal was granted, her score was raised by a tenth of a point, and she catapulted from fifth to third.

By this time, Bărbosu had already draped a Romanian flag over her shoulders to celebrate the first of her country’s Olympic medals in gymnastics in a dozen years: this in a sport once dominated by the likes of Nadia Comăneci.  Indeed, from the time Comăneci appeared on the scene in 1976 through 2012, six different Romanian women won Olympic gold in the floor exercise, and ten earned a medal of some color, averaging more than one competitor per Olympics on the podium.  This was big for the individual gymnast, but perhaps even more so for her country.

Needless to say, Bărbosu was devastated by the change in Chiles’s score.  It’s completely understandable that she felt frustrated, betrayed, and, yes, bitter.  Her initial response garnered her a substantial amount of harassment on social media.  Of course, Chiles suffered that fate, as well, being accused of cheating, as if she had anything to do with the judges’ decisions.  Chiles received the bronze at the medal ceremony, and initiated one of the iconic images of the Games, as she and Biles bowed to Andrade in a gesture of respect and friendship to their Brazilian competitor.

But the story doesn’t end there.  The Romanian team submitted a challenge, claiming that the inquiry about Chiles’s score came after the allotted one-minute window for such appeals.  The TAS ruled that Landi’s challenge did indeed come in four seconds too late, and was therefore disallowed.  That meant Chiles’s score reverted to 13.666.  The TAS kicked the subject of what should happen to the medal back to the FIG (the Fédération International de Gymnastique) who punted the decision back to the IOC, who predictably ignored the Romanian team’s suggestion that all three women should receive bronze medals.  The IOC decided that, having already awarded Chiles the medal, they wanted it back, despite no wrongdoing on Chiles’s part.

But, as they say in the late night infomercials, Wait!  That’s not all!  Notice that the Romanians suggested that not merely Chiles and Bărbosu should receive medals, but so should Maneca-Voinea.  Why?  Well, the Romanian team sought to change her score because she suffered a tenth of a point reduction for stepping out of bounds… which replay showed she did not do.  But that appeal was denied, without explanation (!).

In other words, if the judges had done their job in the first place, Maneca-Voinea would have had a score of 13.800 and would have won the bronze medal.  Even with the extra tenth of a point she received for doing a more difficult routine than she was initially given credit for, Chiles would have finished behind her.  The inquiry, even if it was late, was still submitted before Chiles’s score was posted (the one minute timetable is from the end of the routine), so it would have gone forward, but there’d be no reason for the Romanians to quibble about the timing, because it wouldn’t have affected the medals.  No one cares who was fourth as opposed to fifth. 

Who precipitated the kerfuffle?  Not Chiles or Landi.  Not Bărbosu or Maneca-Voinea or their coaches.  This is all on the judges, the IOC, the FIG, and the TAS.  And not because somebody thinks Gymnast A was “better” than Gymnast B.  No, this is all about getting things objectively wrong.

Let’s not forget that getting Maneca-Voinea’s score correct in objective terms would have prevented all this.  But competent judges would have prevented the Chiles/Bărbosu controversy, as well.  They could have noticed that Landi’s inquiry came too late (assuming it did), and said, right then and there “we’re sorry, this request came outside the time limit, and we therefore can’t review the situation.”  Or they could have waited an extra 30 seconds or so before posting Chiles’s score, thereby announcing only the upwardly-revised total, placing her directly into third place, and not giving Bărbosu the impression that she’d won a medal, only to snatch it away moments later.

The US team subsequently submitted time-stamped evidence that Landi’s inquiry was submitted after 47 seconds, not 64.  The TAS, of course, refuses to re-examine the case in the light of new evidence, and Chiles has been ordered to return her medal.  After all, it’s her fault that the governing bodies fucked up and apparently believed false information (Curmie apologizes if it appears he’s strayed into politics here).

The two teams are, of course, looking after their own, but the Romanian suggestion that the three women each receive a medal is easily the closest we could get to a judicious and ethical conclusion.  Bărbosu has gone on social media commiserating with Chiles (she knows what it feels like, after all), and hoping that the three of them will share a podium in Los Angeles in 2028.  The athletes, the eldest of whom is Chiles at 23, are showing a lot more maturity and a lot more humility than the constipated and flat-out stupid narcissists at the IOC and TAS.

The US team vows to continue the fight to allow Chiles to keep the medal they believe is her due.  Curmie makes no prediction what will happen down the road.  What he does know is that if he were Jordan Chiles or Ana Bărbosu and they came for my medal, I’d be sore tempted to tell them to perform an exercise best suited to extremely limber hermaphrodites.  And I’d know, or at least suspect, that Sabrina Maneca-Voinea might just have a better case than I do.

EDIT: two new pieces of evidence further demonstrate the bungling of the TAS.  First, they notified the wrong US officials of the hearing (!).  Oh, and the International Institute for Conflict Prevention & Resolution reports that Dr. Hamid G. Gharavi, the head of the hearing board which handed down the TAS decision, has represented Romanian interests in such cases on numerous occasions.  That doesn’t mean that he’s corrupt, of course, but he’s definitely pulling a Clarence Thomas by not recusing himself when there’s plenty of appearance of conflict of interest.