YELLOW CARD Globe & Mail!!

...for publishing the article Olympic Doubtfuls by Allan Maki and Dawn Walton. I'll leave it for you to read how our national newspaper is spreading doom & gloom about our athletes and suggesting we're a country of whiners with statements like, "it's a wonder Canada's Olympic motto isn't "Citius, Altius, Unlucky-us."

This article itemizes the injuries suffered by our high performance athletes and makes it sound as though Canada is sending the inmates of a leper colony (no offence) to Beijing. What the hell! These are sports writers?? Injury and recovery - mental and physical - are part of every athletes life. Shouldn't they just acknowledge that this ability to come back from injury stronger than ever is what sets them apart and use the space to, oh I dont know, actually promote Team Canada?

So I'm reading through this article thinking, "WTF?" when I see, "and kayaker Adam van Koeverden, who had surgery to remove a tumour before breaking a bone in his left hand last spring." Was the fact-checker at lunch? Horst Bulau from Ottawa, alerted them to the error with this comment to their web page, "That injury would come as news to Adam Van Koeverden. It was his friend and teammate Mark Oldershaw who broke his hand again last summer. Oldershaw has a good shot at the podium in Beijing." They subsequently changed the on-line article to read, "and kayaker, Mark Oldershaw...". Okay, calling a canoeist a kayaker is a minor foul but seriously, doesn't anyone over there know how to use Google?

And since this is being published in the Sports section you'd think they'd recognize the importance of distinguishing between one discipline and another. Apparently not. In a related May 10th article where they describe "a Canadian Olympic team limping its way toward Beijing", these two remind us that, "just 27 days after her accident, (Silken) Laumann put down her crutches, got back into her boat and paddled into Olympic history with a bronze medal. "

Anyway, I really hope these two (and why do they need two of them? Are they sharing a laptop? A brain?) aren't part of the team of journalists reporting on the Olympics this summer.


ps... Be sure to check their linked photo-gallery called "the Unlucky 8" which still features this photo of Adam