The Olympics,” Nick Pachelli writes in Slate, “are meticulously engineered to generate maximum pathos.” Each short biographical package tries to turn an athlete’s story into a shorts-angled version of a Paul Harvey story: obstacles overcome, injuries worked through, everything falls before their determination to become an olympian. But sometimes, there are stories that rise above simple heartstring tugging. The three Lillis brothers, Jon, 23, Chris, 19, and Mikey, 17, all looked poised to make the US ski team and compete at PyeongChang. But last October, Mikey died in his sleep. Then Chris crashed at a competition in China and tore his ACL. That left Jon, the top-rated men’s aerialist, as the only Lillis in Korea. But Mikey is with him; a glassmaker offered to make a pendant using Mikey’s ashes, and Jon wore it as he marched in the opening ceremony.
We can think of a lot of things we could call Mike Pence; killer comes rather low on that list. But the Guardian’s Marina Hyde awards him the Gold for “killing sport” in PyeongChang. While the IOC has yet to sanction killing anything, much less sport, as an official Olympic event, Hyde argues that Pence is killing the Olympic spirit by being “worst spectator on earth.” Among his fouls? Not standing (or, as Hyde has it, “taking a knee”) when the combined North and South Korean team entered the stadium during the opening ceremony, bringing Otto Warmbier, the father of the student who died after being brutalized in a North Korean prison, and snubbing the sister of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un while they both sat in the VIP seats. (Although it’s possible that he was there without his wife, which means he can’t talk to any woman.) For Hyde, Pence’s “mere presence in the stands reminds the athletes that it couldn’t be less about them.”
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