Friday, August 22, 2008

Olympics

It's been a bad olympics year...

In rowing/women's eights, Romania got a scandalous Bronze, breaking a streak of Golds lasting since '92. It was also the first time since 1976 when they didn't get Gold or Silver.

Gymnastics disappointed badly, with nothing more than a Bronze in women's team and a Gold in women's floor (compared, say, to 4 Golds + 3 Silvers + 3 Bronze in Athens 2004).

Handball is bound to finish on the 7th or 8th place. As a Romanian editorialist aptly noted, the intensity of online swearing that this has produced was previously reserved for soccer.

But above all, Romania got 1 Gold, 1 Silver, 1 Bronze (and 1 nothing) in the IOI happening this week. While the team deserve our warm congratulations, we must be honest and say that this is a disappointing result. In my years, we got 2 Golds + 1 Silver + 1 Bronze several times, and we kept thinking that we should do better...

Nevertheless, our IOI performance was stellar compared to what Romania did in the IMO. For a country used to perfect scores and top participants, getting no Gold in IMO'08 is outright abysmal.

Romania has to get its act together before it's too late. The one thing that we cannot afford to learn from Europe is their acceptance of mediocrity. It is not particularly bad being a mediocre Westerner, in no small part due to a pervasive feeling of entitlement. But Romanians share no feeling of this sort. In the global conscience, the mediocre Romanian is the strawberry harvester of Spain, the construction worked of Israel, and the purse snatcher of Italy. Without a constant flow of outstanding results, these images will define how the nation thinks of itself.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

--begin IMHO--
As a matter of fact, said by "a mediocre wurstelner", i think you are asking an instable country to look
for and to care for their 'best children'.
Unfortunately resources
(of any kind) are to be distributed
towards the main needs, where main
is defined by numbers.
Top is a synonim of restricted, thus they are an issue that can be fulfilled only when (almost) everything underneath is solved.

Talking about the facade, even if the global world is a web of trust,
looking for acknowledged results
in order to keep up the internal
faith towards Romanian's ability
has the main drawback of keeping
the country slave of its acknoweledgee.

Nevertheless, everything i said could be completely wrong and time will be the final judge.

--end IMHO--

Mihai said...

I'm not proposing that "the country should be slave of its acknowledgee". I think it's a reasonable hypothesis that a group of people needs to feel good about itself before the people become more assertive and make a better life for themselves. And the easiest way to make a group feel good about itself is to make the people proud of a few members of the said group (this being far easier than making each individual happy with his own life). It doesn't really matter what the rest of the world thinks, just what the group thinks of itself.

Anonymous said...

you are a bright guy.
i wan't to ask you something: do you think that western european civilisation is so bad?

at least they are more reallistic, they don't think they are the top of the world

and another important thing: they are doing an effort to fight against ecological polution..