Obligatory Olympic Post
I’m not an Olympic fan, not spending every spare moment watching the games. In fact, I have them on my phone and have so far watched half-an-hour of cycling, and I’d watch that if it was the tour de Quebec.
Every Olympics, however, there’s a couple of events, couple of compelling stories that catch me. So far in this Olympic, it’s Shin A-Lam, the South Korean fencer.
I’m not up on the niceties of fencing, but here’s the gist. There was a timekeeper error, the timekeeper in the event being a 15-year old British volunteer. Shin A-Lam had, by rights and by rules, already won the match. However, the error meant the match went for one more session. A-Lam lost in that session, thus losing the match.
In order to protest the results, a fencer must stay in the fencing area. While the officials took 45 minutes to process the official protest, the fencer sat on the mat and sobbed in front of the 8,000 spectators.
Sadly, the officials decided, quite literally, that the clock runs the referee, not the other way around and South Korea’s Shin A-Lam was out of the gold medal hunt.
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