As I am writing this, at 17:00 this very cold, quite bright day, there are appx. 30000 Swedes on the way to Medborgarplatsen, going to celebrate the fact that a few people who are citizens of this country (Sweden) have together won a gold medal in the olympics? I think it's for playing ice-hockey, but I'm not.
Well, it's for the country, or so I'm told. What's for the country, you say? Pride? A sense that we all together have something in common, because these people have won a tournament?
If these players would have failed at attaining even a bronze medal, their names wouldn't have been mentioned anywhere, utterly un-hailed and nothing would have been written except for a few diatribes where old journos would have scorned even the players' spawn's future spawn.
But today, “we won“ and “we're the greatest“ adorn the Swedish papers. Why, oh why, don't they proclaim the opposite when “our“ athletes rock like a pile of shit? Imagine it, headlines like “We're the worst!“ or “We've lost! That's bad!“ I'd definitely celebrate that.
Do I hate sports? Not at all, but I just hate the way the papers and people in general seem to love themselves when a few athletes, who are citizens of of the same country as they, win something. These regular people seldom say or write anything when “our beloved athletes“ lose. I love the way nationalists say something like “we're on the way to a gold medal!“ (meaning the athletes) and (the athletes) fail miserably, as there's nothing more exhilerating than saying “Oh, YOU lost miserably. You're bad!“ They give you the most twisted stare, having somehow severed the what-was-sacred-at-least-a-day-ago link betwixt themselves and their heroes of yore.