Not all Olympians are created equal
“Korean” hockey players from Canada.
“Nigerian” bobsledders from the United States.
A “Canadian” gold medalist speed skater from the Netherlands.
And there were dozens of other athletic mercenaries competing at the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics, which wrapped up on Sunday.
Team China’s total of nine medals ranked near the middle of the pack, but in terms of national pride and integrity the Chinese athletes were pure gold — simply because they were all homegrown.
According to global mobility company CapRelo, the Games featured 178 athletes who competed for nonnative nations. The list included 37 US-born Olympians who switched countries, 20 from Canada and 19 from Russia.
The biggest benefactors of the talent drain were host South Korea (18 athletes from other nations), Canada (21, including Netherlandsborn Ted-Jan Bloemen, who won gold and silver in speed skating) and Germany (11, including gold medal pairs figure skaters Aljana Savchenko from Ukraine and Bruno Massot, from France).
Alpine skiing (32) and figure skating (26) were the top two events for flag-changers.
Oh sure, South Korea’s men’s hockey team — augmented by six Canadians and one American — and the three US-born-and-trained “Nigerian” bobsledders were feel-good stories at the Games, but the flip side is that for every one of those flag-changers, one legitimate homegrown athlete was denied an equal opportunity to represent his or her country on the greatest stage in international sport.
Nigerian skeleton racer Simidele Adeagbo was born and raised in Canada, while the first women’s bobsled team to ever represent Africa at the Winter Games was comprised of Seun Adigun, Ngozi Onwumere and Akuoma Omeoga — a trio of American track stars.
For some flag-changers, the motivation is purely financial. Others find it a convenient way to extend athletic careers that are winding down. Alpine racer Kilian Albrecht, who represented his native Austria at the 2002 Salt Lake City Games, skied under Bulgaria’s flag eight years later in Vancouver.
“It wasn’t about the Olympics for me; I skied for myself, not my country,” Albrecht, now the agent for US downhiller Mikaela Shiffrin, told CNN Sports last week. “I just wanted to continue racing. That wasn’t possible in Austria, so I looked for an option and ended up skiing for Bulgaria.
“Obviously it was controversial — people called me a traitor or said, ‘Well, he just switched nations because he was really bad,’ which isn’t true. I tried to do the best for myself and the people who supported me rather than doing it for a nation.”
For Albrecht — and many of his fellow flag-changers — national pride apparently doesn’t count for much. There’s no way to prove it, but I’d bet dollars to donuts that the hundreds of millions of TV viewers watching the Games were much more impressed by the reaction of China’s Liu Jiayu after she won silver in the women’s halfpipe — the nation’s first medal in Pyeongchang and first ever in snowboarding.
“For me to win a medal is exciting personally, but to draw more attention to the sport back home and to promote its spirit around my country makes me happier,” said Liu.
Spoken like a true homegrown Olympic hero.