Puzzling

I don't participate in any winter sports despite living in a city that hosted the Winter Olympics, but I do read multiple newspapers every day and some of the news from Korea is simply puzzling. A bronze medal winning curler from Russia has tested positive for a banned substance. It boggles the mind that a curler, a curler, took some sort of performance enhancing drug. Then yesterday, before the ice dancing short program, I read an article asking why more women didn't wear unitards instead of skimpy costumes for figure skating. Today I imagine that the young French woman wished she had worn a unitard. Add to those items the fact that Lindsay Vonn has been receiving endless hate messages after saying that she wasn't interested in meeting Trump.

Gone is the idea that the Olympics are supposed to be about fellowship. We have been treating it as a nationalist show since at least 1936. But athletes are primarily about working hard and trying to do their best. For me it's sort of like listening to a superior singer and being awed that the singer and I are from the same species. We have debased the Olympics with commercialism; we don't need to tarnish it more.