So far, the 2014 Winter Olympics Opening Ceremony in Sochi has been what you’d expect. Stray dogs are wandering into the stadium, the Trololo song made it onto the soundtrack without irony and the Jamaican team entered triumphantly alongside one of the throwaway characters from The Hunger Games.
Oh, and they screwed up the rings.
So, you know, totally on par with everything we’d want to happen in the Sochi opening ceremony, besides maybe Zangief showing up and spinning piledrivering somebody. Things culminated in a beautiful torch-lighting from Irina Rodnina, one of Russia’s most successful figure skaters and a member of its public chamber. I’m sure if they picked a lady like that to light the Olympic torch they did some basic research on who she is or what she thinks about … no? She tweeted a picture of Barack and Michelle Obama to make them look like banana-obsessed monkeys?
Oh, uh, cool. Okay.
(via @juliaioffe)
The tweet was taken down quickly, but don’t worry, she didn’t make a mistake by being nonchalantly offensive … why no, of course not, it was a LIBERAL CONSPIRACY. Via The Guardian:
Rodnina insisted that there was nothing wrong with the photograph, and said she had been sent it by friends in America. “Freedom of speech is freedom of speech, and you should answer for your own hang-ups,” she wrote.
Rodnina, who lived in the US for many years, deleted the photograph but has not apologised and remains unfazed by accusations of racism. Instead, she suggested that the wave of criticism she prompted from liberal journalists and other Russians was a conspiracy.
I can’t wait to see what happens next, Sochi. If robots rise up from the snow and start murdering people during the ski jump I will legitimately not be surprised.
