AS I SEE IT COLUMN: Even the Olympics don’t unite us anymore

It used to be true that sport had a unique capacity to pull people together. Whether their views were left, right or somewhere in the middle, a world juniors or a Grey Cup or an Olympics had the ability for people to put their political and cultural differences on the shelf, as we all cheer for “our” team to win.

Indeed, that had always been one of the beautiful aspects of sport, it transcended partisan politics and ideologies. One of the best examples of this was the Olympics, the planetary gathering of the world’s best athletes, inspiring us with their magnificent athletic achievements and displays of genuine sportsmanship.

Sadly the days of sports uniting us are getting harder to find. Now people inject their political biases into sports whenever they can. In this space, we would love to focus only on sport, but because so many dark and disturbing forces are injecting their hatred into sport, we feel that it needs to be exposed.

The Paris Olympics gave us three troubling examples of people inserting their political beliefs into sports.

The opening ceremonies were the first example. We covered that in detail a couple of weeks ago but if you were vacationing in Antarctica, there were people who wrongly assumed that some portions of the opening of the Olympics were mocking Christianity.

Like their views on masks and vaccines, their issues with the opening ceremonies were based on emotions and feelings and not on facts, as the artistic director said the portion of the opening ceremonies that so upset the victimhood crowd was not referencing The Last Supper, but instead Dionysus, the Greek god of dancing and feasts.

Then there was the deranged reaction to American gymnast Simone Biles’s beautiful display of sportsmanship. If you missed it, Biles, the most successful gymnast in the history of that sport, won a silver medal in the floor event. On the podium she bowed to the gold medal winner, a competitor who had overcome three gruesome ACL surgeries.

To the sane, rational normal sports fans in the world, it was a touching reminder that sportsmanship and camaraderie still exist. But not the NFL’s Marlon Humphrey. He wrote on social media “This is literally disgusting.”

Since when is showing grace and class in defeat “disgusting”?

And then there was the horrific treatment of female Algerian boxer Imane Khalif. Thanks to terrible lies that viciously misgendered her as a biological male, she received all manner of death threats and disgusting messages on social media.

Khalif had been beaten nine times before the Olympics, but that didn’t matter to the folks looking for another opportunity to spread their hate-filled lies. Because she happens to have a masculine look, these haters told awful lies about Khalif, lies that had zero basis in facts, medicine, science or reality. (Do you detect a pattern here?)

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) held a press conference to try and quell the racist, sexist bigotry, stating categorically, “The Algerian boxer was born female, was registered female, lived her life as a female, has a female passport. This is not a transgender issue.”

The vile things said about Biles and Khalif are clearly an ugly byproduct of Trumpism. The former president’s constant displays of cruelty and racism have given permission to his cult followers to also be cruel and racist and violent. Trump’s unvarnished hatred and his souring of public discourse has resulted in deranged people feeling free to spew their darkest thoughts and impulses.

Words have consequences. How do we know this?

Because the organizers of the Paris closing ceremonies were forced to change their plans because they were receiving death threats.

That’s right, instead of changing the channel and watching something else, or going for a walk or weeding the garden, some unstable people threatened to kill the Paris organizers.

How full of hate does your heart have to be if you threaten to kill people you don’t agree with? This is a sickness.