And you're a dumbass: The Spanish Basketball Team

Monday, August 11, 2008

I got sent this link to me about the Spanish basketball team (thanks to an anonymous user that passed it to my inbox from The Guardian) and you just have to wonder what in the hell they were thinking, because while you might expect that from maybe one individual, you really just don't expect to see it from say, I don't know - a whole friggin national basketball team.



Here's some text from the original story;

Spain's Olympic basketball teams have risked upsetting their Chinese hosts by posing for a pre-Games advert making slit-eyed gestures. The advert for a courier company, which is an official sponsor of the Spanish Basketball Federation, occupied a full page in the sports daily Marca, the country's best-selling newspaper [...]

No one involved in the advert appears to have considered it inappropriate nor contemplated the manner in which it could be interpreted in China and elsewhere. No offence was intended by the advert, but whether the Chinese see it that way is a different matter and it is likely to provoke more criticism at a delicate time for Spanish sport [...]
Reading the full article I'm left wondering two things: How did the author of the article deduce that there wasn't any offense intended by the advertisement (and like it matters anyway), and who actually put them up to it.

At the same time, I honestly can't help but actually wonder if this is somehow fake news because it's just that absurd, and in a way, I'm waiting for someone to e-mail and say "Gotcha!" because you really just don't think this is going to happen nowadays - I mean seriously - this is messed up.

Someone. Anyone. Please tell me this is a joke.