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Freeze Peach | Olympic Medaling, at Any Cost (Part I)

By J.B.Browne

American Media's Unofficial Olympic Sport for Tokyo 2020 Absent for Paralympics, but at What Cost?

Wide shot of Japan's Tokyo 2020 Olympic closing ceremony (Chang W. Lee NYT)

Japan breathed a sigh of relief much as we did at the closing ceremonies of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic and Paralympic games. Firstly, congratulations to all the athletes who took part. Congratulations, Team USA, for just winning the most golds AND total medals. Congratulations, Team China, for doing the same at the Paralympic Games by a long country mile. Congratulations, Tokyo Organising Committee, for pulling off such a world-spanning event amid the onslaught of COVID inconvenience.

Finally, congratulations to those 'oh so insecure' American media companies who covered the main games with a virulent strain of sinophobia and geopolitical agitprop. Broadcasters such as NBC, The New York Times, and The Washington Post won gold again in Olympic Medaling — a failsafe-time-honored method of counting medals entirely differently than the official Olympics website and most, if not all, non-American outlets who base their medal table positions on the total number of golds won.

Rules of Gold: Traditionally, the country in top position may have fewer overall medals than countries ranked below them. (Olympics.com)
Rules of NBC: Spin it till you win it. (NBC.com)
Rules of NYT: Signs a country may be self-obsessed include consistently "one-upping" others at any cost. But at what cost? (@nytimes)

Such hubris meant that when any other country crept up the table with sneaky golds — wait. No, the Olympics is a once every four-year display of American exceptionalism. Thus, America stays on top throughout, like that soccer team who arbitrarily adds number of tackles and passes made to up the goal tally. And since when were silver and bronze worth their weight in gold? At what cost?

Nobody:
NYT: They've got more golds; let's make 'em small, so it looks closer. (@nytimes)

NYT's warped copium led Tweeter @IanRichardMarkG to comment:

"In every table or medal list since the Olympics began, the Nation with the highest number of gold's is always the FIRST. American fragile egos just can't deal with 2nd place. America is a petulant toddler."

Some cursory research shows that this habit started around or just after 1976 when the US placed third in gold medals during the Summer Olympic Games in Montreal.

Olympic Medal Standing, Montreal, 1976 (Taisu Zhang, Twitter)

The Cold War was still very much in effect in 1976. Needless to say, it didn't bode well that the "good guys" could be seen to be losing to both the Soviets and East Germans. Nevertheless, by 1980, the NYT chose to rank the medal table by total, long before China re-entered the Olympics, winning any medal, but enough to compete with forever nemesis, the USSR.

Further down the rabbit hole, and Wikipedia of all places has a section that stipulates in 2008 that IOC President Jacques Rogge confirmed: "the IOC does not have a view on any particular ranking system."

Whatever the reason, one imagines Olympic Medaling as America's failsafe mechanism to preserve their cultural imperialism of "we're No.1 at all costs," something famed writer Goerge Orwell noticed with the essence of international sports and the Olympics, describing them as acts of "war minus the shooting."

But medals were just the tip of the zero-sum iceberg American media has been increasingly metastasizing into a brand of neo sinophobia with severe imperialistic overtones. With clunky racial biases and a deafening cognitive dissonance for morality and human decency, anti-China-anti-Chinese propaganda was at an all-time high this summer. But at what cost?

As he would refer himself, J.B. Browne is a half "foreign devil" living with anxiety relieved by purchase. HK-born Writer/Musician/Tinkerer.

 

The views do not necessarily reflect those of DotDotNews.

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