“We did whatever we could to win.” (A modern parable.)
Remember that lovely Olympic slogan from a few years back…?
The one that claimed, ‘You don’t win silver: you lose gold.’
Lots of people got very vocal about that and the International Olympic Committee immediately stated that the Olympic ‘family’ still lived by the original slogan, the one that claimed that partaking in the event was more important that winning medals.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we lived in a world where people really believed in that Olympic ideal?
The pity is, we don’t.
Our world is becoming more and more like the following story:
An essay that won a six-year-old girl tickets to a Hannah Montana concert has been exposed as a fake.
The essay began with the line: “My daddy died this year in Iraq”.
A spokeswoman for the contest’s sponsor said the girl’s mother told company officials her daughter’s father died in a roadside bombing in Iraq on 17 April.
The spokeswoman said Priscilla Ceballos had now admitted it was not true. The sponsor, Chicago retailer Club Libby Lu, is now reviewing the matter.
The AP news agency quoted Ms Ceballos in an interview with Dallas TV station KDFW.
“We did the essay and that’s what we did to win… we did whatever we could to win,” she is quoted as saying.
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