I remember seeing Beckie Scott interviewed just moments after she made Olympic history in Salt Lake City – the first North American to capture an Olympic medal in cross country skiing. It was a bronze.
She was angry. She said some intemperate things about the two Russians who had bested her.
Textbook sour grapes. I hear it all the time in my own sport – subject to subjectivity and political alliances and feuds, complaining about dirty tricks is commonplace, but neatly deflected by the “sore loser” accusation.
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Maybe Beckie has something to teach us about the difference between sore losers and undeserving winners and standing your ground in the face of contraversy. |
Today, it’s a gold. Congratulations, Beckie!
Kate,
Such an excellent story!
Recall similar protests from the US women’s swim team in 1972 (Munich).
There they had complained that the East German and Soviet women looked like men in the locker room.
They too were branded “sore losers”. Years later it was revealed what was believed, that the Soviet-bloc atheletes had been given a number of steroid and other anabolic agents at the behest by their respective governments in a kind of athletic engineering (read experimentation).
It also appears that the some of the atheletes had been misled as to what it was they were taking, and many of them suffered serious medical illness years later.