Tom Holland tweets: “2 ways for host cities to enjoy the Olympics: applaud competitors from other countries (London) or boo them (Rio)”
It’s like New Yorkers. They love to dump on LA. People from Northern California also love to hate LA. But residents of Los Angeles can’t be bothered to hate any other city.
It seems like everything Brazil touches gets corrupted.
Mark Moffett writes:
It didn’t take long for the Brazilians to rewrite the norms of Olympic fandom.
The list of Olympic participants targeted by Brazilian boos is long and varied: Russians, due to its doping scandal; Spaniards, as symbols of Latin American colonialism; a tennis ball boy who had butterfingers; favorites—like the poor Romanian women’s handball team—when they played the underdogs; and, of course, anyone from Brazil’s historic rival Argentina, who probably get the worst of it.
Pole vaulter Renaud Lavillenie was booed by the Rio fans—twice in 24 hours—to the point he was in floods of tears on the podium, leading the International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach to take the unprecedented step of saying the crowd’s antics were “unacceptable at the Olympics.”
The fans were so boisterous at a beach volleyball game between the Brazilian and Czech teams that the public address announcer had to repeatedly admonish them against booing the visitors (link in Portuguese). A normally staid air-pistol event almost turned into a melee when unruly Brazilian fans tried rattling the concentration of foreigners as they pulled the trigger (link in Portuguese).
At a tennis match where fans heckled the player from Argentina, there was a scuffle in the stands (link in Spanish)—perhaps the first ever case of tennis hooliganism.
In London four years ago, the British fans got behind not only their own country, but every other in the spirit of sportsmanship. Alberto Murray Neto, a Brazilian lawyer who has served in the past on the Brazilian Olympic Committee, says that as Brazilian soccer dominated the sporting culture here, mastering the codes of other sports will be a learning process for many people who have never seen them played. “This is the Brazilian way, which is different from the very proper English way in 2012,” he says.
At the Riocentro sports complex on Friday night (Aug. 12), the fans were as much the talk of foreign tourists and athletes as the Games themselves. Marian Busch, a German tourist, said Brazilians are wonderful people—as long as you don’t run into them in the bleachers. “They do things that would be considered unfair and unsporting in Europe,” she says.
Good sportmanship is a gift of the WASPs just as the least corrupt countries were created by WASPs (United States, Canada, England, Australia, New Zealand). WASPs make the best citizens.
WASPs rule! I wrote in a recent post that I was getting the sense that Americans with Protestant European backgrounds were the best behaved. So I decided to sum all my prior post numbers that dealt with ethnicity and moral behavior to assess this idea systematically. I followed the simple strategy of assigning a rank for each behavior for each of the 8 ethnic groups with sufficiently large sample sizes. Jews were often ignored in previous posts since one must turn to the religion rather than the ethnicity variable to get estimates, but I wanted to include them, so I calculated numbers and then ranks for them.
I included all variables that I have posted on–here’s a list of them: okay to cheat on taxes; drinks too much; ethnocentric; dirty house; frequents prostitutes; promiscuous men over 30; feel that infidelity is not wrong; gay; lesbian; husbands and wives who cheat; fathers divorcing mom; women arrested; and promiscuity for men and women and under. I realized that I had not posted on drug abuse so I added that to the rest. I ranked group so high numbers indicate more bad behavior, then I simply summed the 16 rankings for each ethnic group. Here are the totals:
Bad Behavior Index
Blacks 106
Mexicans 85
American Indians 85
Italians 70
Irish 67
Jews 64
Germans 56
English/Welsh 47My hunch was correct. This pattern coincides with that feeling that goes way back among nativists that the moral quality of the country was slipping with the mass immigration from Catholic, southern and eastern European countries, and more recently in concern over immigration from Mexico.
