South Korean TV thought it would be helpful to viewers to have images to represent each nation in the Olympics opening ceremony.
Italy was pizza, which to be fair kinda makes sense. But then it got weirder with Ukraine represented by Chernobyl, Haiti was a riot, Marshall Islands, it said “was once a nuclear test site for the US, and is composed of more than 1,200 islands.” El Salvador was introduced with a picture representing Bitcoin.
South Korean broadcaster MBC used images to "represent" each country during the #Tokyo2020 Opening Ceremony.
Italy: pizza
Norway: salmon
Haiti: upheaval
Ukraine: Chernobyl pic.twitter.com/KpUXATuZld— Raphael Rashid (@koryodynasty) July 23, 2021
The broadcaster MBC has form. It was fined after using similar captions and images at the Opening Ceremony for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. It had then referred to Zimbabwe “as a country with deadly inflation”. To be fair if we were doing word association inflation would be the word that springs to mind for most people if you said Zimbabwe.
It reminds me of The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy’s entry for Earth – Mostly harmless.
I could not find what they used to represent team GB or the Irish team. For Ireland, I would go with Big Liam Neeson. Your suggestions are welcome.
Photo by Riedelmeier is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA
I help to manage Slugger by taking care of the site as well as running our live events. My background is in business, marketing and IT. My politics tend towards middle-of-the-road pragmatism, I am not a member of any political party. Oddly for a member of the Slugger team, I am not that interested in daily politics, preferring to write about big ideas in society. When not stuck in front of a screen, I am a parkrun Run Director.
