Category — Winter Games

You will become our idol if you will also speak out for aboriginal rights before Vancouver’s 2010 Winter Games in 2010? Maybe you should also ask athletes to think about Canada’s treatment of Native Canadians before they participate in the Vancouver Games.

If you will say something like that, we will be happy to include you in our honor list of people (Archbishop Desmond Tutu, etc) and institutions (Amnesty International, etc) who have an admirable human rights record.

If you will not say anything in 2010, we will include you in our list of poseurs who are bashing China’s human rights record but who were silent about the human rights violations committed by former Olympic host countries. You will be in good company. Our list currently includes Hillary Clinton (who will say anything to get elected), Angela Merkel, and other wannabe human rights advocates whose advocacies are cheapened by their selectiveness.

Will you rise up to the challenge, Elvis?

*****

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Because he will sue you and you’ll end up paying him. From Reuters:

Olympic gold-medal-winning snowboarder Ross Rebagliati has settled a lawsuit over a television series that he had accused of defaming him.

The Canadian snowboarder reached the out-of-court settlement with CTV Television network and producers of the series, “Whistler,” according a statement released by his spokesman on Friday. Terms of the settlement were not disclosed.

What was the lawsuit about?

Rebagliati said he was defamed by a character in the syndicated series named Beck MacKaye, who was portrayed as a former Olympic snowboarder and resident at the Whistler, British Columbia, ski resort whose death was linked to alcoholism, womanizing and blackmail.

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Whoo. This is juicy news. But disturbing too. Who would think of drugging Olympic gold medalist Pasha Gishuk with GHB, “a predatory drug that can be mixed with alcohol to reduce resistance from a victim before a sexual assault?” Could it be the butler? The waiter? The candlestick maker? Whoever s/he was, we hope that the police is running after his or her ass.

Associated Press: Former Olympic ice dancer Pasha Grishuk was drugged with GHB, a common date rape drug, during a business meeting at a ritzy Orange County hotel, a sheriff’s spokesman said Tuesday.

Grishuk, who won Olympic gold medals for Russia in ice dancing in 1994 and 1998, was attending a business meeting at the St. Regis Monarch Beach on April 12 when she began to feel ill and numb, sheriff’s spokesman Jim Amormino said.

While eating dinner, she spotted a partially dissolved pill in the bottom of her drink. Investigators later found another dissolved pill in the bottom of a drink she ordered in the hotel’s lounge.

Amormino says toxicology tests that came back Tuesday were positive for GHB, but it wasn’t immediately clear how the pills got in Grishuk’s drinks or who put them there.

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