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Olympics Omnibus thread


odessasteps

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Besides hockey, curling is my Winter Olympics must follow sport. I've watched as many matches as I could for three Olympics now and I gotta admit when I saw Shuster back again my initial reaction was, "This bum again? Can't we find anyone better?" I've never been happier to eat my words. It's one thing to pull off a miracle run but sticking it to all us naysayers has to make it all the more sweet.

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 Fifty years ago today, October 16th 1968. Tommie Smith (Gold medal, with a then World record time of 19.83 seconds) and John Carlos (Bronze medal, 20.10 seconds) raised a gloved fist during the playing of the Star Spangled Banner. It wasn't a time of great change. It was a time of great resistance to change. Lyndon Baines Johnson had been President for five years, following the JFK assassination in 1963. Robert F Kennedy had only died five months earlier, and Martin Luther King two months before that. Muhammed Ali was banned from boxing. In that moment both men (all three men, if you include Peter Norman) threw a great deal away to take a stand for what they believed in. Both were vilified, castigated, both of their families received death threats. It took a decade before popular opinion began to shift and regard them as the heroes they were (and still are).

This statue stands in the grounds of San Jose State University. Peter Norman specifically requested that he not be represented, as he wanted other people to stand in his place, and feel as he felt:

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When Norman died in 2006, Tommie Smith and John Carlos served as pallbearers at his funeral. In 2012, he received a posthumous apology from the Australian government for the treatment he received on his return to his home country. His silver medal time is still the Australian 200 metre record. 

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EDIT TO ADD: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's column this week is about this:

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2018/oct/17/smith-and-carlos-embodied-many-african-americans-summer-of-love-and-reckoning

Edited by AxB
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I never really got the impression the yes side had the momentum. People are very big on watching the Olympics on TV and very lukewarm on spending to actually host one. Even a lot of sports fans have really turned on the cost of new facilities, which is the same reason Calgary has no real current plan for a new NHL arena; they looked at the sweetheart deal the government gave Katz in Edmonton and said "we do not want this". Olympics spending is exponentially worse, so it seems in recent times. Even if we discount the utter, total gong show of costs in Sochi, it just isn't pretty. The Yes plan involved basically the idea that "if we pay $400 million another $4 billion in provincial and federal money will appear through Space Magic" and it was never really explained well how that would happen.

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