Hmm… let me see if I’ve got this right… Members of the Spanish men and women’s basketball teams work hard and earn a trip to China to compete for an Olympic medal. But, before they leave their homeland they decide to pose for a newspaper ad in which they place their hands on their faces and pull the skin near their eyes to make them look as slanted as possible.
“Chinese eyes,” claims one Spanish player. “How funny.”
Not so much if you are Chinese.
Long story short the chuckleheads on the Spanish basketball team are now apologizing—–publicly—for they call “a lapse in judgment.”
Gee, ya think?
Only it took international outrage over the ad for the players to say they were sorry and for Spanish publications to pull the photo of the players poking fun at their Chinese counterparts.
“If anyone feels offended by it, we totally apologize for it,” Pau Gasol, a Spanish star who also plays for the Los Angeles Lakers, told the New York Times yesterday in Beijing.
At least he apologized. Some of Spanish team members refused to admit that what they had done was offensive.
Another Spanish player, Jose Calderon wrote on his blog, “We felt it was something appropriate, and that it would be interpreted as an affectionate gesture.”
Affectionate? Someone ought to consider buying Calderon a dictionary.
Other Spanish team members maintain the ad was taken out of context, that it was meant as a joke, and they were pressured to take part in it.
Way to take responsibility guys.
“All of the Spanish people are close to the Chinese people mentally,” one team member said. “We have a very good relationship.”
Of all the Spanish basketball players who spoke publicly about the ad Gasol appears to be the only one who offered an apology that had any semblance of being sincere.
“To me it was little clownish for our part to be doing that,” Gasol told reporters. “It was just a bad idea to do that. It was never intended to be offensive or racist against anybody.”
The Chinese have yet to comment about the ad. However, yesterday, a spokeswoman for the International Olympic Committee said the apology was accepted.
The only problem—she’s not Chinese.
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