To Err Is Human: My Olympic Media Experience, by Annick Labadie

I’m a bit slow. Occasionally, pieces of information are strung together years later, at the most unpredictable time. The brain is a funny thing.  For instance, since I’ve been eleven years old, I’ve known that journalists screw up sometimes.  Though I’ve witnessed the blunders firsthand, I never thought: well, if someone messed this up, maybe that means others also mess up elsewhere, too. That is, until last week. That’s when I momentarily morphed into a militant Nationalist over the Vancouver Olympics for no good reason. That’s when I remembered my own dealings with journalists. I finally figured out that, just like other people we call experts, journalists make a whole lot of mistakes. I said I was slow right?

Over the past ten days, streams from the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) have abducted my laptop and me. A couch and a bathrobe are slowly digesting my body. Olympians rule my life. Tucked away in my icy living room, I cheer, curse, and smile on my own. I’m almost pathetic. I mean, patriotic. I spit back insults at the pixels on my screen whenever the faces in display shoot down my maple syrup. My so-called politeness. My Sidney Crosby. My “own the podium” slogan. My games. And they’ve been shooting those down a whole lot.

I’ve stayed up till morning for speed skating, curling, and for those hockey games turning Canadian Nationalism into National Anxiety. I’ve dedicated most of my daytime hours – a time during which Vancouver sleeps – to reading pieces of reporting and commentaries on the games. Disaster. Now, frustrated and homesick, I ache for Canadian broadcasting, and for the showing of rainy Cypress Mountain without a hint of mockery. Journalists and their tired analyses have incensed my bathrobe and I.

What first ignited my quasi-jingoist pride was the New York Times’ hypothesis on the Olympics as a rewiring of national mindset, essentially from “Shy and Canadian” to “more American”. Thankfully for the flag-waver in me, this was later refuted (sort of) in Rex Murphy’s National Post Full Comment. Second came ESPN’s weekly columnist Rick Reilly, who struck my patriotism with a proverbial kick in the balls after penning these opening lines to a weekly column:  “it’s always cute when Canada hosts an Olympics. Canada tries so hard. This comes from living next to America and having an inferiority complex worse than Tito Jackson.” Of course, that America is Michael Jackson – half genius, half tragedy – made me smile. That Bruce Arthur later called Rick Reilly an overpaid millionaire hack on Twitter made me smile, too.  But this hasn’t just been some below-the-belt North American beefing festival. The Brits have hopped on the hatred bandwagon too (here for Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph samples).  Their collective snarkiness — which almost looks like an attempt to make London 2012 look good by making Vancouver look bad– forced me to trade in the bathrobe for a Roots Canada sweatshirt. To hear them speak, our Olympics are a flop.

But, you don’t have to plow through all of those links to get the picture. As Paul Shirley mentioned in another column, just take my word for it. The world is hating, and pretty much talking out of its ass. If I were to believe the global media, I’d think of Vancouver as a disorganized, overly apologetic, hero-less collective failure with a penchant for disaster. These fans surely look disappointed with Vancouver.  I’d also think my country was “as a vast land of furry creatures and cheerful idiots who are obsessed with hockey, beer and donuts”. Just like Michael David Smith worded it. While there’s some truth to the picture, it’s about as precise as portraying America “as a vast dumpster of obese creatures and condescending idiots who are obsessed with the Star Spangled Banner, guns, and high fructose corn syrup.” Or portraying England as “a fallen empire of lazy Imperialists and backward-looking idiots obsessed with Lady Di, earl grey teabags, and the weather.” It’s kind of entertaining, sure, but it seems that, aside from displaying only basic if not false understanding of a place, the jokes have been recycled a million times already.

Maybe, in the midst of this pedestrian humor, I’ve been taking my country too seriously. Been too defensive. But, as I’ve sat on my couch, I’ve been reminded that maybe it’s the journalists that I take too seriously. I shouldn’t be so mad. That would be giving the New York Times, the English, and Rick Reilly way too much credit.  As I’ve watched Lindsay Vonn flying down Cypress Mountain, I’ve thought of my own ski races and newspaper features. And it all “clicked” somehow.

1997 was the year I raced in my first alpine skiing provincial championships. Inspired by Olympians like Picabo Street, I was excited to ski against my province’s best. The event, then the pinnacle of my short existence, led to my first interview with Le Soleil, the local newspaper. I remember it well. The journalist, small pad and pencil in hand, sat with in front of me at a cafeteria. It must have been painful for him to discuss with a pigtailed kid who, mixing cow print race suit, fluorescent ski boots, and gold helmet, looked like a bad marriage between Don Cherry and Elastigirl. I’m sure he had better things to do.  The next morning, my dad braved the February cold, and returned a few minutes with the Soleil newspaper. Sitting at the kitchen table, I quickly turned the pages to the sports section.  In the article, one part of my hyphenated last name was missing a “h”. My birthplace should have read “Cap Rouge,” instead read “Lac Beauport”. And I was down for the “Midget” age category instead of “Bantam” one.

As the years went by, my trust in local journalists dissolved a little bit, but probably not enough.  With time, typos matured into misquotations, and the forgivable mistakes transformed into frustrating hints at laziness. Similar blunders seemed to aggravate others around me as well. In the sport media, “but I never said that” was the common denominator. Newspapers made a whole lot of mistakes.

Journalists also worked myopically around “an angle”. I was at the tail-end of my prosaic basketball career when I experienced it firsthand.  A short man in his mid-thirties spent twenty minutes rewording the same question, while I painfully reworded the same answer. The one he wanted, one I was unwilling to give despite the pitfalls of my NCAA experience, was that playing at a Canadian university was a better move than migrating across the border on an athletic scholarship. He wanted me to say: “me thinks Canada good. Me thinks America bad.” A simple slogan, if you will; a tagline similar to “Canada, the land of furry creatures and cheerful idiots”.  I just couldn’t give him that. The interview was dreadful, but it’s edited version, even more so. Turns out, “while I think Canadian universities offer many advantages academically, I’d still encourage girls to try something different if that’s what they want” sounds nothing like “I think Canadian universities offer many advantages”.

Sitting in my couch, I’ve now relaxed a bit. No reason to get mad, or overly patriotic. Canada isn’t perfect anyway. But the media, like everything else, isn’t perfect either. It’s simply full of creative fiction masqueraded as fact, whether it pertains to Bantam provincial skiing championships, commentaries on University athletics, or to the Olympics. Vancouver is reminding me of what I knew all along.

The coverage, however incensing to the proud Canadian, has been screaming “think critically”. And that doesn’t just mean criticize ideas in the same way Rex Murphy criticizes Charles McGrath’s New York Times article. It means I, Annick, will remember that, just like behind the Olympic performance is an Olympian, behind the text is a human writer. A writer, who, like me, may enjoy the idea of recoiling on a couch to watch the Olympics instead of digging for a new “angle”.  A writer with an assigned subject, an editor, a paying reader, a deadline, and a word limit. A writer who, like the one who jotted down my personal information back in ‘97, couldn’t care less about the topic. Or, like the one who probed me on my NCAA experience, cares a bit too much.

Thinking critically might not just be about reacting to the words, but reacting to the context in which they were written; to the human element.  That’s when my stance on Rick Reilly softens; like some Olympians, he’s had some crappy performances (even if it’s cute when he tries so hard). When I consider the human element, that’s when I put journalists — and my outrage/ exuberant celebration of Canadian Olympics — into perspective.