No wearing Burke tributes, Olympic athletes told
It’s just a little thing, a simple thing, dwarfed by the size of the Olympics. Australian snowboarder Torah Bright and Canadian Roz Groenewoud usually wear tributes to the late Sarah Burke on their helmets when they compete. At the Sochi Winter Games, they will not, for the simple reason that the International Committee has banned them. It is a simple thing.
“On Sarah Burke, we have, as with a lot of the athletes here, huge sympathy,” said IOC spokesman Mark Adams. “She really needs to be well remembered, I think, and absolutely, we want to help the athletes to remember her in some way and there are all sorts of things we can do.
“We would, for example, help them if they wanted to have a press conference. They can obviously talk about her in various places. We can organize something in the Multi Faith Centre, either individually or collectively. We really feel that, and we really think she is an important person to be remembered.”
Burke was 29 when she crashed on a routine training run in Utah and slipped into a coma; she died on Jan. 19, 2012, leaving a sea of heartbroken people behind. Her husband, Rory Bushfield; her parents, Gordon and Jan; everyone who loved her. So Groenewoud and Bright have worn “Celebrate Sarah” stickers in honour of their friend, and Groenewoud has used a smaller red “Sarah” next to a silver snowflake. A little thing, a sweet thing, a beautiful thing. They are carrying a friend. But at the Olympics, it is not allowed. Bright wrote on Instagram that “I am also here to honor my great friend Sarah Burke who left this world two years ago ... Sarah is a beautiful, talented, powerful woman, [whose] spirit inspires me still. She is a big reason why skier pipe/slope are now Olympic events.”
Groenewoud recently told reporters her grief still hits her at the strangest times; she went to London 2012, and it was the first time she truly realized Sarah wouldn’t be in Sochi with her. And this decision smacks of opaque, heartless control, of a sad little thing. This is the place where Russian snowboarder Alexey Sobolev rode with his phone number on his helmet until the IOC made him cover it up. Snowboarder after snowboarder have custom-decorated boards—Sobolev’s, featuring a woman in a ski mask wielding a knife that some mistook for a tribute to the dissident Russian band, Pussy Riot, was the most notable.
But the memorial stickers are out, and the IOC remains this tone-deaf edifice. It would be easy to let it go, wouldn’t it? If there is a rule? There must be a rule.
“It is not the rule that really is very important at all actually,” said Adams, a preternaturally smooth speaker. “In cases like this rules are not the most important thing. For us it is a question of what is appropriate, and where would be the best place. As I say, we are very keen to help people who want to have a remembrance or do something and to do that in what would be the appropriate place.”
So, the event itself is not the appropriate place?
“I think just the general idea is that we want people to remember her, and we don’t think that in a competition, in the excitement and the celebration of a competition, is necessarily the right place,” said Adams. “We think that it’s a celebration place, and we don’t think that that’s the right place.”
Norway’s cross-country team apparently received a warning letter after four skiers raced with black arm bands to honour the brother of Norwegian skier Astrid Uhrenholdt Jacobsen, who died a day earlier. As Reuters wrote, “IOC officials said the letter to the NOC was not an official reprimand but rather a reminder of the rules.”
But Adams said this wasn’t about the rules. The IOC’s Rule 50 says that no “publicity or propaganda, commercial or otherwise, may appear on persons, on sportswear, accessories or, more generally, on any article of clothing or equipment whatsoever worn or used by the athletes or other participants in the Olympic Games, except for the identification.”
But is a memorial publicity? Is it commercial? There is a Sarah Burke Foundation, which funds young female skiers. Maybe that goes too far? But if you take what Adams said, that’s not it at all. He said the IOC considers its events to be exciting, to be celebrations. The dead, apparently, do not belong at celebrations. Let the good times roll.
Before her seventh-place run in slopestyle Sunday, Bright tapped her heart. I hope Groenewoud does something, too. They race to celebrate Sarah Burke’s life.