The New Puritans

I haven’t been following the Winter Olympics – sport tends to bore me rigid. However, I can understand why a winning team would want to have a bit of a celebration. The puritans in the IOC don’t seem to think so, though.

Victorious players emerged from the dressing room, still in their uniforms and with gold medals hanging from their necks, more than half an hour after beating the United States 2-0.

During their impromptu celebration on the Vancouver ice rink Haley Irwin was pictured pouring champagne into the mouth of team-mate Tessa Bonhomme, while another player tried to drive the ice-resurfacing machine and honked the horn.

Honked the horn, eh? Wow! Quelle horreur! And so what? Young people win a big competition and let off a bit of steam? This is news? Oh, yes, this is news alright:

Others lay stretched out on the ice drinking from champagne bottles and beer cans.

The demon drink!

Marie-Philip Poulin, 18, who scored both goals, is still under the legal drinking age of 19 in Vancouver but was pictured on the ice with a beer in her hand. The drinking age in Alberta, where the Canadian team trains, is 18.

Which just goes to show that Canada is as daft as the USA when it comes to such silliness. 18 is plenty old enough, frankly.

It wasn’t just the drinking that enraged the puritans, oh no, they smoked cigars! Poison! Eeeeevil! We’re all gonna die! Second third fourth fifth-hand smoke! Run for the hills!

Step forward Gilbert Felli to comment on this display of flagrant wickedness:

But Gilbert Felli, IOC executive director of the Olympic games, said: “It is not what we want to see. I don’t think it’s a good promotion of sport values.”

Prior to the rise in purselipped, petty, peevish, puritanism, it was precisely the values I would expect. People win, people have a party to celebrate. Big deal. It’s harmless and for the participants, a bit of fun.

God help us in the sterile new world where people like Gilbert Felli run things; dry, barren, dull, tedious, righteous and mind-numbing.

6 Comments

  1. Ah, I see you noticed this as well.

    Mr Felli has previous – he was, it seems, one of the IOC negotiators who accepted China’s right to censor journalists’ coverage of the Beijing Games. Clearly some “values” are more important than others.

  2. Frankly the IOC should be disbanded, flayed and salted, then set on fire, then extinguished, then flayed again. Then shot in a body part that would cause a long slow death. They are possibly the only people on the planet who rate higher on the scum scale than our government.

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