The Winter Olympics is done and dusted. It’s outta here. Four years of non-Winter Olympics related peace lie ahead of us. But first, or actually last, by way of a final word here is the thing we loved most about it and the thing we loved least.
**1. THE THING WE LOVED MOST**
From a Team GB perspective, and we do hail from this windy mountain-less isle, even if we’re not always stoked about it, the women ruled the snow (and ice). Of course there was Jenny Jones, whose bronze medal was THE FIRST TEAM GB SNOW MEDAL EVER, but of the four Team GB medals three out of the four were won by women. Crazy stats! Along with Jenny Jones we had Lizzy Yarnold’s mighty gold in the Skeleton (headfirst on a tea tray) event and we scored the women’s team bronze in the curling (bowls, with a broom, on ice) event. In a world where teenage girls are giving up sports in their droves and male sportsmen dominate the back pages day in day out, in Jenny Jones and Lizzy Yarnold we had two women totally taking over the front pages and home pages of every news outlet in the country. Girls need role models in the public eye, and much as we love football, sports coverage is so male-dominated 99.99999999% of the time. Make no mistake this change, albeit temporary was MASSIVE.
And what’s even better is that they weren’t semi-naked at any point. Jenny Jones and Lizzy Yarnold are of course pretty and sexy and all that but that wasn’t the focus of any of the coverage, that we saw anyway. They were being championed because they were super rad world beaters at their chosen sport. And that makes us smile big time.
We’d love to live in a world where gender and body image doesn’t matter, but when you have amazing Olympic gold medallists like Rebecca Adlington feeling rubbish about themselves not to mention the crazy abuse the amazing Olympic gym medallist Beth Tweddle got on twitter recently it clearly does.
**2. THE WORST THING**
The worst thing about this Winter Olympics for us was the lack of protest over the ongoing gay rights abuses in Putin’s Russia. We discussed it before the games when very little was being said save the protest at the Winter Games NZ, and wondered perhaps if athletes were saving their big symbolic protests for the Sochi podium, but nope nada went down.
Apart from Cheryl Maas’s rainbow-glove sporting that is, which Whitelines picked up on. Was everybody silenced by their national bodies or did they just not have opinions on it or did they not want to be the poster girl or guy for the story maybe? Dunno but we expected a little more from a sport that we always thought was super progressive.
