Co-opting culture for the glory of gold

While I admit I am not an avid Olympics fan--I cannot say I want to see any more scenes of cold weather than the ones surrounding me every day--I can't help but run into coverage of wins, losses, tragedies and controversies of Vancouver 2010.

One such controversy is that surrounding Russian ice dancers Oksana Domnina and Maksim Shabalin. More specifically, their costumes have been decried as offensive, inaccurate and insensitive to Australia's aboriginal groups. The pair debuted these costumes at the European Championships in January, and amid criticism, the costumes were "toned down" for the Olympics.

The original costumes were dark-skinned body suits with red loin cloths and lots of white markings on their bodies. Leaves and face paint completed the outfits. At last night's Olympic event, in which the pair slipped from first to third place, the bodysuits matched the skaters' skin tones and the face paint was removed.

Despite these edits, many still railed against the skaters for their choice of outfit.

In a Sydney Morning Herald editorial last January, Bev Manton, chairwoman of the NSW Aboriginal Land Council, asked Domnina and Shabalin to reconsider their costumes before the European Championships. They wore the costumes anyway, and won gold at the event.

Reporters were quick to jump on the controversy, and many, like Washington Post sports columnist Tracee Hamilton, agreed with Manton's assertion that the performance was a gross misrepresentation of Aboriginal culture.

While I agree with and applaud Hamilton and others like her for coming out against the costumes, I take issue with the overall mass media coverage of the event. What could have been an important lesson in racial and ethnic sensitivity was quickly overshadowed by the U.S. hockey team's victory over Canada. And for those who argue that the hockey win was more relevant to America, I would fire back, "Oh really? Please name a player on the U.S. Olympic team." I doubt many could recover.

If you did wake up Monday morning and find coverage of the ice dance debacle on your news feed, you can bet it was gone by lunchtime. A Google video search yields results from competitions years ago, but none from Sunday night. Maybe this is the nature of the Olympics--to publicize events at a rapid-fire pace so everyone gets their time to shine. But then again, how many times have we heard about Shawn "Animal" White or Lindsey Vonn?

And worse yet, msnbc.com, which has partnered with NBC Sports to provide exclusive web coverage of the Vancouver Olympics, has not only minimized the costume-event, but they've made a mockery of it as well. If you want to see coverage of the Russian ice dancers, you'll be hard pressed to find a video. (The one video available is listed as a "premium video," and viewers must go through a registration process in order to see it.) The first and most prominent result for a search on "russian ice dance" is a slideshow of "Ice dancing's wild and wacky costumes."

Is it just me, or are blackface and cultural ignorance neither wild nor wacky?

Photo Credit: Yahoo Sports