BEIJING-Greetings from the front lines of the 2008 Olympic Games women’s volleyball final.
The Brazilians are out in full force. On the court. In the stands. And especially here at the media tribune, where more than a few in the country’s rambunctious press corps are wearing more yellow and green than Brazilian star Paula.
The Brazilians aren’t the only ones who have brought national pride to press row. At Thursday’s women’s water polo bronze medal match I sat next to a Hungarian writer who was wearing the same golf shirt that the Hungarian coaching staff was wearing on the pool deck. Every time Australia scored he pounded the press table in disgust sending his computer bouncing.
The press box fashion statements, however, cannot simply be passed off as Brazilian passion or the lingering remnants of Eastern European groupthink.
The journalistic impartiality that North Americans take for granted is pretty much a foreign concept in the rest of the world. When it comes to the Olympics it would be hard to distinguish the media from the athletes if so many hacks didn’t own physiques that are clearly not the products of performance enhancing drugs. That is unless Heineken is now on the banned list.
So after defending his Olympic 10, 000-meter title Ethiopia’s Kenenisa Bekele was interviewed by a pack of Ethiopian journalists dressed in the same sweat suits as Bekele. A similar scene was repeated after Usain Bolt’s record-setting victories. I made it through four decades of blasting the Stones and Springsteen only to have my hearing permanently damaged by the screams of approval by the Italian press corps sitting behind me when Zidane was ejected from the 2006 World Cup final. Walk through the work room at the Main Press Center and it looks like the cafeteria at the Olympic Village. Here’s a Cuban radio crew dressed in official adidas Cuban Olympic team wear. There’s a half-dozen Czech writers decked out in “Team Czech Republic” gear. And there are Russians everywhere, all of them looking like they raided Elena Isinbaeva’s closet. Even the Fleet Street’s rabid dogs sport “Team Great Britain” polos. I can’t help wondering: does the music critic for the Daily Mail show up at Amy Winehouse shows wearing “Rehab. No! No! No!” t-shirts?
There are exceptions. My Dutch friends avoid wearing orange. That is unless the Netherlands is taking on Germany in an event. No explanation needed. The Germans also avoid wearing official gear because doing so would be recognition of actual emotion.
We American hacks of course are uniform only in our slobbery. Our fashion tastes tend to run toward free golf shirts from tournaments Tiger didn’t play in, soccer jerseys from foreign teams (sorry Tim, not a Becks in the bunch), t-shirts from rock bands that don’t get played on the radio anymore, t-shirts from strip joints, t-shirts from resorts we can’t afford to go to, t-shirts from the Las Vegas Hard Rock, t-shirts from road races we ran in when we could actually fit into the t-shirt and pretty much anything from the alma maters we almost graduated from. Or in my case anything from my wife’s alma mater. If you went to a school that refers to itself as the “UDub” and you’d go Stanford too. But more often than not we generally wear whatever’s clean. Or at the Olympics whatever’s almost clean.
I know it’s not a pretty sight but at least I’ve yet to see an American scribe in a Nike “USA” pullover smeared with soy sauce. I did spot one U.S. sportswriter wearing the baseball cap of his hometown team. Can’t name names but let’s just say Artie Moreno would be pleased. Globalization, it’s working Artie, one hack at a time!
I also have to admit I’m one of a number of American journalists (most of whom also went to the UDub) that have gone north of the border.
The phenomenon of U.S. media wearing Team Canada gear, first made by Roots, now by the Hudson’s Bay Company, started in Nagano because, well, it was cool. But it was in Athens where the fashion trend really took off. Because most sportswriters majored in journalism, history or English in college with minors in self-importance, we figured that when Al Qaeda or some Greek terrorist group nabbed us at the Acropolis they would take one look at the maple leaf on our t-shirt and think we were from Medicine Hat or Parry Sound.
But it was in Sydney where the Canadian line created the biggest stir. Our Australian colleagues were quite delighted to tell us that root is Aussie slang for a sexual act.
Talk about a fashion statement.
