ADLER, Russia – The official languages of the Olympics are English and French, even here, where no one speaks English or French but where you can still find two staples of most American diets.
Specifically, Budweiser and M&Ms.
Certain things, you see, are universal. Take the security detail that recently was seen shadowing Vladimir Putin. I’m pretty sure those guys didn’t speak English or French either, but it didn’t require an interpreter to figure out what they were saying. It was clear from their combat armor and machine guns.
Still, sometimes things don’t translate well at the Games. Sometimes an old man is trying to say something nice about young women and what comes out is as awkward as, well, as awkward as an old man talking about young women.
“I like women’s hockey because it is like I used to play hockey,” Swiss sports executive Gilbert Felli said. “It is not banging too much (into) each other, but it is really fluid … and you can see something because it doesn’t go so fast.”
So the technical director of the International Olympic Committee likes women’s hockey because it lacks the excitement of hard checking and moves slowly enough for the elderly in Switzerland to follow along?
I’m not entirely sure what a “technical director” does, but I was surprised to learn his duties include making a donkey of himself.
Now, being fair, Felli is 66, meaning he can remember a time when girls understood their place in sports, namely on the sidelines, wearing skirts and lip gloss and cheering for the boys.
In 2008, however, Felli was listed as the 17th most powerful global sports figure by Bloomberg, the list also including, at No. 25, Maria Sharapova, and just imagine what Felli would say if he attempted to compliment her.
One possibility: “I like women’s tennis because it is like I play tennis today. A lot of heavy breathing and jiggling body parts.”
Anyway, right now I’m sitting at the women’s gold medal hockey game, watching a matchup of the U.S. and Canada, two countries so dominant in the sport there has been talk of eliminating it from future Winter Games.
Personally, I can’t see how it would help the general movement to have less hockey and more airtime for men dressed in silly curling pants, but then what do I know about running the Olympics?
Left to me, I probably would have stuck these Games in a place where the hotels come equipped with things like doors, walls and floors and where visitors are much less likely to be struck by a meteor.
Russia just marked the one-year anniversary of the Chelyabinsk meteor, which produced a shockwave powerful enough to damage buildings and injure some 1,500 people but, incredibly, still not disturb this country as much as its men’s hockey team just did.
I don’t know. Maybe all this talk about eliminating the women’s game is just another misunderstanding among people speaking different languages. It could happen, particularly in Russia, where they don’t make alphabet soup as much as alphabet goulash.