The world is getting smaller and smaller. And also getting screwier and screwier.
I am watching the Winter Olympics as much as I can.
What hits me is that I see the strangest named athletes competing for a particular country.
By strange names I mean non-Russian sounding name in the Russian team and other curious things.
It seems that if a person can not make his or hers home country teams they shop around the world to see where can they compete.
For example here is the Jamaican team. They have a single player competing in freestyle skiing. Now Jamaica is not very well known as a skiing paradise but not to worry. The sole athlete was born in good old California and has been skiing there since he was about four years old.
He didn't make the US team but since his mother is Jamaican he qualified for that country.
Then there was this Japanese girl who loved pair ice skating. She was born in Japan and grew up there. However the Japanese were not much for pairs skating and she couldn't find a suitable partner in her home country.
So she went shopping. Not to Macy's but out into the World. As it turned out Russia had a partner to offer and probably the best training and coaches money could buy.
At the end this girl moved to Russia, changed her name to be more pronounceable in Russian and became a Russian citizen. Oh, and gave up her Japanese citizenship for which they call her a traitor back home.
But she made the Russian team and is now competing in Vancouver. Actually, her and her partner got fourth place in the finals.
Then there is this German figure skating pair. The girl has a Ukrainian name and she was born in the Ukraine. But somehow she wound up in Germany and now skates for that country.
The guy who got silver in the Men's Moguls Final is a native Vancouverite but is now competing for Australia. It seems that since he became an Internet millionaire Canada didn't want him for some reason so he showed them all right. Got the medal for Australia!
The world is becoming the playground for professional athletes as well.
At one time I was looking at the compositions of various Hungarian soccer teams. Those teams are all professionals.
I saw the weirdest looking "Hungarians" playing there. They don't have Hungarian sounding names and most of them are much darker than any suntanned Hungarian I ever saw. Some are from Cameroon, Gabon and God knows from where else.
There is nothing wrong with buying talent. But this makes sport into not what it originally was intended to be but big business.
Why is it that an overweight, no talent football player gets $15 million for a year while a talented ice skater who represents this country in the Olympics has to struggle in private life to support his family and to make ends meet.
What did any of the football players or the overpaid baseball players ever do for this country to deserve their money?
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You could look at the teams in the Premiership. A few Hungarians, but many, many from Africa. If I am right, one of the best teams, Arsenal, has no English players at all. Even the manager is French. People just go where the money is. In football here, players earn up to £160.000 a week. (This is correct, not an exxageration.)They can also sell to other teams for many millions.
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