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Errors on hockey team’s Olympic clothes
FIRST musician Ard Matthews bungled the national anthem, now an unknown embroiderer has sabotaged the men’s national hockey team’s tracksuit.
“South Afica” reads the logo on the back of one. An “r” can be crucial in a word.
But that wasn’t the only mistake. The tracksuits also spelt “London” incorrectly.
“Londndon 2012” it read, with an extra “nd”.
Leon Fleiser, Sascoc’s team preparations manager, said yesterday that the men’s hockey tracksuits were to have been worn during a preparation tour ahead of the Olympics.
“We took immediate steps to rectify the mistake, and the tracksuits have already been replaced,” he said.
But the question remains: how did the mistake go unnoticed until the tracksuits were in the hands of the athletes?
“Sure, it’s just plain stupidity on the part of the embroiderer,” said Beff Hooper, who runs a small business which supplies custom-embroidered tracksuits.
“But a lack of quality control on the part of the supplier is where the blame really lies.
“This is what happens when people are too lazy to double check and proofread the products which they are commissioning.”
While we may never know where the “r” ended up, the enigma of “Londndon” may be easier to crack. That extra “nd” lends itself to a theory of what may have gone wrong.
An embroiderer types the word “London” on his computer screen (logos are digitally designed before they are transferred on to material). He gets to “Lond” and is distracted.
He attends to the distraction and returns to typing. Only, he rehashes the last thing that was on his mind, “nd”.
Journalists, writers and typists do this all the time. It is probably the most common typo of all: the repetition of a word or phrase in the middle of a sentence. “The cat sat on the on the mat.”
Evidently, if you are working on only one word for the day (as the embroiderer of “Londndon” was probably doing), the kind of typo translates into repeated letters, not words or phrases.
But before you cringe in anticipation of a national embarrassment, the official Olympic kit is free of all blunders, assures Fleiser.
“I wouldn’t be speaking to you now if (it wasn’t). I would be out of a job,” he said.
Fleiser refused to reveal the name of the South African company responsible for the tracksuit blaps.
However, conspiracy theorists who spoke to Daily News sister paper the Argus believe that the r-scandal has Ard Matthews’s fingerprints all over it. But it’s also possible that Matthews is not responsible. Sometimes shirt happens.