Accusations of racism hurled toward U.S. Skating Committee over Olympic team selection [View all]

[RandySF]

Do officials at U.S. Figure Skating have a penchant for blondes over brunettes?

After a controversial decision to put Ashley Wagner (along with Gracie Gold and Polina Edmunds) on the U.S. Olympic figure skating team instead of Mirai Nagasu, some skating fans think that more than hair color played a part. The decision was made a day after Wagner performed miserably and finished a distant fourth to Nagasu’s third at last week’s U.S. National Championships.

The selection was unprecedented. Only four previous times in history did the association pick a skater out of order for the Olympic team – and each time it was because of an injury that kept the chosen skaters from performing at the national championships. Wagner was not suffering from a malady of any kind (except maybe stage fright).

Given that the three female skaters chosen for the Olympic team all had hair of gold (with one even named as such), it didn’t take long for accusations of racism against Asian Americans to surface. First on Twitter, then in The Wall Street Journal.

“Wagner’s flowing blond hair, bellflower-blue eyes and sculpted features mark her as a sporting archetype,” thundered Jeff Yang in the Speakeasy blog. “She’s the embodiment of the ‘golden girl’ the media has extolled when they’ve waxed poetic about idealized ice queens of the past, from Norway’s Sonja Henie to East Germany’s Katarina Witt, a marketer’s dream who’s already signed up tent-pole sponsors like Nike, Pandora Jewelry and CoverGirl, which assessed her Teutonic beauty as being worthy of serving as one of their global ‘faces.’”..


In 1998, after Tara Lipinski edged Kwan for the Olympic gold in Nagano, MSNBC blasted an Internet alert that screeched “American Beats Out Kwan.” The network announcers on NBC also appeared to favor Lipinski in their commentary, never mind that the Southern California-born Kwan was every bit as “American” as the Philadelphia-bred Lipinski.



http://thediplomat.com/2014/01/mirai-nagasu-skating-controversy-did-race-play-a-part/