It’s the Olympics. What could possibly go wrong?
After the 2012 day one blunder when the South Korean flag was used to welcome the North Korean football team, Channel 4 News recalls memorable diplomatic gaffes from the world of sport.
It’s not even the first error to have caused embarassment in front of our foreign friends. Arabic-speaking sports fans have been welcomed to Stratford rail station next to the Olympic Park with incomprehensible welcome signs written in Arabic, only back to front. “Welcome to London” was printed as “N o d n o l O t E m o c l e w”. Garbled welcome messages also appeared on staff t-shirts at Westfield shopping centre. The faux-pax was blamed on computer programes which failed to replicate the Arabic language’s right-to-left sentence structure during printing, using European-style left-to-right instead. It also added an extra space in between each letter.
June 2012: The South African women’s hockey team were shocked when an apartheid-era national anthem echoed from the loudspeakers before a game against Great Britain in London. The anthem is a throwback to the days of white minority rule over South Africa. “I thought, ‘what is that?’,” chief executive of South Africa hockey, Marissa Langeni, said. “And when I listened further, I realised it was [apartheid national anthem] Die Stem. I couldn’t believe my ears.” Organisers Great Britain Hockey apologised for the mistake, blaming it on a contractor. South Africa went on to beat Great Britain 3-1.
March 2012: Comedian Sacha Baron Cohen’s spoof Kazakh ‘national anthem’ from his film, Borat, was unwittingly played for the Kazakh gold medallist at a shooting competition in Kuwait instead of the real one. Complete with references to Kazahstan being the “number one exporter of potassium”, and the nation’s “prostitutes cleanest in the region”, Maria Dmitrienko did her best to remain straight-faced until the song had ended. But Kazhakhtan described the incident as “a scandal” and demanded an investigation. Organisers later apologised, saying someone had mistakenly downloaded the Borat version from the internet.
June 2008: Swiss viewers of a Euro 2008 match were asked to sing along to banned Nazi lyrics running as subtitles to the German national anthem before the Germany v Austria match. Beginning with “Germany, Germany, above everything else in this world…” (“Deutschland über alles…”), the offending verses were in the original anthem selected in 1922, but have been banned for 63 years because they were used by Nazis as propaganda. Bosses at Swiss station SF2 blamed researchers who copied the lyrics of the stanza from the internet.
October 1992: The US Marine Corps marched onto a field during Game 2 of the World Series between the Atlanta Braves and the Toronto Blue Jays carrying an upside-down Canadian flag. The incident provoked something of a flap, with upside-down American flags produced in return, until then-president George H W Bush issuing two apologies to Canadians. The Marine Corps admitted the error of their ways, saying it had happened because the Marines had been given flag at the last minute.