Day: February 16, 2022

Victory, of sorts, for Eritrea’s sole Winter Olympian — one of just six athletes competing for African countries at the Games in China — was achieved even before his feat of surviving two runs in blizzard conditions down a hazardous course aptly named The Ice River.

Before flying to China for his Olympic ski race in the mountains northwest of Beijing, Shannon-Ogbnai Abeda learned of a cross-country skier living in Germany who has been so inspired by Abeda’s trailblazing that he’s aiming to qualify for their East African nation at the next Winter Games in 2026.

“It was because of all the interviews that I did and, you know, me coming and doing this again,” Abeda, who also raced at the 2018 Pyeongchang Olympics, said after his 39th-place finish in the giant slalom that only 46 of 87 starters completed in Sunday’s snowstorm.

“He wants to now carry the torch,” Abeda said.

So just imagine: How many other enthused young wannabes could emerge from the African continent of 1.3 billion people, and from the African diaspora spread around the world, if they only had more than a handful of Olympic pioneers leading the way, showing that barriers of racial prejudice, inequality and geography are surmountable?

That question is more pertinent than ever at the Beijing Games, because African representation has shrivelled since a record eight African nations, fielding twice as many athletes as in Beijing, competed in 2018. Eritrea, Ghana, Morocco, Madagascar and Nigeria are back; Kenya, South Africa and Togo are not.

Skiing — Alpine and cross-country — was the only sport Africans qualified for. There was just one African woman: Mialitiana Clerc, born in Madagascar and adopted by a French couple as a baby, is now a two-time Olympian. Having broken through in Pyeongchang, she raced in Beijing to 41st place, out of 80 starters, in giant slalom and 43rd, out of 88, in slalom.

Elsewhere, at the skating rinks, snow parks and sliding track, there was no African representation at all. African sliders were thwarted by less inclusive qualifying rules, despite making history in Pyeongchang. There, Nigeria fielded Africa’s first-ever bobsled team; Simidele Adeagbo, also Nigerian, became the first African and Black woman in skeleton; and Ghana’s Akwasi Frimpong blazed trails on the men’s side.

Adeagbo, frustrated to have been left on the sidelines for Beijing, says the plunge in African representation requires an Olympic response. The movement’s five rings are meant to symbolize the five inhabited continents. But in Beijing, Africa’s presence feels barely bigger than a dot. Adeagbo notes that the Summer Olympics “see a rainbow of nations represented” and wonders why that’s less the case in winter, given that “sport is supposed to be democratic for all.”

“Is this the European Olympics or is this an Olympics that reflects the world?” she asked in a video interview with The Associated Press. “So hopefully this will be a catalyzing moment to help everybody kind of regroup and think about a different way forward.”

“We’re talking about the Olympics; we shouldn’t have complete exclusion,” Adeagbo said. “Given the resources and support, Africans are just as capable.”

Looking ahead to 2026, the International Olympic Committee says it will reexamine qualification rules and quotas, which African Olympians want used to carve more space for them. But there’s no sign of IOC dismay about Africa’s retreat in Beijing.

“There are five continents represented here,” said James Macleod, head of an IOC sponsorship program that helped fund athletes on their Beijing journeys.

The IOC gave individual scholarships to 429 athletes. Europe, with 295 beneficiaries, got the lion’s share. Africa, with 16, got the least. Five African recipients qualified for Beijing. The Americas (50), Asia (47), and Oceania (21) got the remainder. The IOC says its aim is Winter Games that are more competitive, rather than “artificially” more universal.

African recipients say the funding was vital for them. They argue that increased financing for African winter athletes would see more qualify. Abeda — born in Canada, where his parents resettled in the 1990s, fleeing war in Eritrea — said US$1,500 per month in IOC funding helped cover his living, training, coaching and equipment costs. He wants private businesses “to step up,” too.

“At Pyeongchang, it was really great to see more Africans,” he said. “At these Games, there’s very little. So I am disappointed.”

Adeagbo said her bobsled alone, cost $40,000.

“I don’t think any sport should be just for the privileged and these are the things that we need to have real conversations about,” she said. “Sport is not meant to be just for one group.”

The IOC says COVID-19 disruptions that played havoc with athlete preparations could partially explain Africa’s slump. Frimpong’s hopes of qualifying again for Ghana in skeleton were dashed by coronavirus positives that forced him out of races ahead of Beijing. South Africa also likely would have sent athletes had it not been for the pandemic, says Cobus Rademeyer, head of social sciences at South Africa’s Sol Plaatje University, who has written on Africa’s history at the Winter Games.

“The pandemic has definitely broken the momentum,” Rademeyer said by email to The AP. He expects Africa to bounce back for 2026, writing: “Although some people see the participation of African athletes at the Winter Olympics as ‘glory-hunters,’ it has been an inspiration for many others.”

Skier Carlos Maeder, born in Ghana and adopted by Swiss parents, says he’s been amazed by a flood of messages from supportive Ghanaians. Also an IOC scholarship recipient, he raced in the snow-hit giant slalom but skied out in the first run.

At 43, he’d like to find other Ghanaians to follow in his footsteps and “will ski as long as it’s necessary to find some.”

“I hope that these games will be a door opener,” he said. “It’s not just about the African continent: We are spread around the world. So that makes it important that our continent is represented.”
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Crowds gathered in Barcelona’s historic downtown to watch in awe and snap cellphone photos as teams of people in colorful garb formed human towers rising into the air like the spires on the nearby medieval cathedral. 

A giant figure in bright blue dress and a floral crown paraded through the streets in representation of St. Eulàlia, the city’s patron, a 13-year-old girl who was crucified by Romans in the early fourth century for refusing to renounce Christianity. 

After two years of canceled or muted celebrations due to the pandemic, this Mediterranean city went all-out this past weekend to mark the February 12 feast, or “festa” in the Catalan language, of its longest-celebrated patron. 

With the most recent nationwide outdoor mask mandate lifted by the government just days earlier, Barcelonans were especially eager to revel in the three-day “festes de Santa Eulàlia,” with celebrations that make social distancing impossible and require painstaking choreography and training. 

Celebrated with a specific protocol since the 1600s, the festival has been gaining renewed popularity since the early 1980s. It includes solemn Masses, intricate dances and parades of “gegants,” larger-than-life historical and fantasy figures usually made of papier mâché and borne by revelers. 

While rooted in Catholic liturgy, today the festival is primarily a secular expression of pride and shared cultural identity in the Catalonia region in northeastern Spain, passionately celebrated even if most who take part don’t identify as believers. 

“The resurgence started with ordinary people who wanted to do something that would be their own, belonging to Barcelona,” said Nil Rider, a historian who helped organize an exhibit about St. Eulàlia at the cathedral’s Diocesan Museum. “This is living heritage that gives people an identity.”  

Foremost among the festival’s traditions are the “castells,” or “castles,” as the human towers are called, which have been performed for two centuries by neighborhood groups not only in Barcelona but in local festivals across Catalonia. 

Dozens of “castellers,” or group members, stand packed tightly together, compressing every inch of their bodies into each other to form a base. Progressively lighter-weight members then climb up to establish six or more human tiers until they form a support for the top performer, a young child wearing a mandatory helmet — and, this year, a KN95 face mask. 

“What we like is to achieve a challenge that we only are able to do together. It’s very identity-forming,” said Dan Esteban, a casteller and former head of the group representing the neighborhood of Poble Sec, just outside the medieval core. 

Two years of pandemic restrictions and lockdowns in hard-hit Spain have left people out of practice, and Esteban said the group wasn’t able to train at all until September. Even now fewer people than usual show up for twice-weekly sessions, which are crucial for getting everyone to work in concert since budging just an inch can bring the entire structure crashing down. 

Cristina Velasco also worried about recovering lost ground as she planned for this year’s “correfoc,” another traditional element of the festival in which adults and children parade in horned devil costumes alongside spinning fireworks displays. Sunday night’s would be the first full parade since the pandemic, with fewer children taking part as some turned to other activities and haven’t returned. 

“We have the feeling we have to do it because otherwise we will lose it,” said Velasco, who has been dressing up as a devil for 30 years and is president of the city’s federation of three-dozen neighborhood correfoc groups. 

Teaching youngsters the allegorical and historic origins of the correfoc tradition is vital, she said, even if “99% of people don’t even know where the devil came from.”  

Clutching a statuette of St. Eulàlia, 10-year-old Laia Castro, 10, waited patiently in line under a chilly drizzle to enter the majestic Gothic cathedral Saturday, the day commemorating the saint’s martyrdom. Descending into the crypt where the saint’s remains have been venerated since the 1330s, she signed a registry kept in the sacristy for girls named with the common diminutive for Eulàlia. 

“Really we’re not religious, but we like this celebration,” said her father, Albert Castro. 

He hopes for Laia to know the saint’s history and then make her own decision about faith: “And if she believes, she will know she did something extra today.”  

The Rev. Robert Baró Cabrera, director of the Cathedral’s cultural heritage patrimony, said the festival’s spotlight on identity and devotion to the saint offers “a powerful environment for evangelization” even as secularism continues to grow. 

“Our churches are both cultural and identity references,” he said. “If people want to find the roots of their identity, they can’t help but go into the church.”  

In one of the festival’s most evocative celebrations, a performer bearing a giant eagle figure with flowering branches in its beak paraded Friday night from city hall through the old quarter, accompanied by drums, bagpipes and flutes. 

Arriving at the soaring Gothic basilica of Santa Maria del Mar, built where St. Eulàlia was first buried after her martyrdom, the eagle entered the packed but hushed sanctuary and proceeded to pirouette in front of the altar in a six-century-old ritual. 

On hand were Loli García and her 4-year-old granddaughter, Ona, whom she brought to teach her about their roots and culture. 

“It’s one thing not to be religious, but they have to know the history,” García said as Ona stood on a pew and watched, spellbound. “I take her to all traditional Catalan celebrations, as I used to do with my daughter.”   

 
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P.J. O’Rourke, the prolific author and satirist who refashioned the irreverence and “gonzo” journalism of the 1960s counterculture into a distinctive brand of conservative and libertarian commentary, has died at age 74. 

O’Rourke died Tuesday morning, according to Grove Atlantic Inc. Books publisher and president Morgan Entrekin. He did not cite a specific cause but said O’Rourke had been ill in recent months.  

Patrick Jake O’Rourke was a Toledo, Ohio, native who evolved from long-haired student activist to wavy-haired scourge of his old liberal ideals, with some of his more widely read takedowns appearing in a founding counterculture publication, Rolling Stone. His career otherwise extended from serving as editor in chief of National Lampoon to a brief stint on “60 Minutes,” in which he represented the conservative take on “Point/Counterpoint,” to frequent appearances on NPR’s game show “Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me!”  

“Most well-known people try to be nicer than they are in public than they are in private life. PJ was the only man I knew to be the opposite. He was a deeply kind and generous man who pretended to be a curmudgeon for public consumption,” tweeted Peter Sagal, the host of “Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me!” 

“He told the best stories. He had the most remarkable friends. And he devoted himself to them and his family in a way that would have totally ruined his shtick had anyone ever found out,” Sagal said. 

His writing style suggested a cross between the hedonism of Hunter S. Thompson and the patrician mockery of Tom Wolfe: Self-importance was a reliable target. But his greatest disdain was often for the government — not just a specific administration, but government itself. As a young man, he opposed the government as a maker of war and laws against drugs. Later on, he went after what he called “the silken threads of entitlement spending.” 

In a 2018 column for the venerable conservative publication, The Weekly Standard, he looked on with scorn at Washington’s gentrification. 

“People are flocking to the seat of government power. One would say ‘dogs returning to their vomit’ except that’s too hard on dogs. Too hard on people, also. They come to Washington because they have no choice — diligent working breeds compelled to eat their regurgitated tax dollars,” he wrote. 

O’Rourke’s other books included “Give War a Chance,” “Driving Like Crazy,” “None of My Business” and “A Cry from the Middle.” Entrekin told The Associated Press that O’Rourke had been working on a one-volume look at the United States as seen from his hometown: “A History of Toledo, Ohio: From the Beginning of Time Til the End of the Universe.” 

O’Rourke was an undergraduate at Miami University and received a master’s degree in English from Johns Hopkins University in 1970. He started out writing for such underground publications as the New York Ace and joined National Lampoon in 1973, where his colleagues included Douglas Kenney, who later co-wrote “Animal House” and “Caddyshack” and with O’Rourke edited the parody “National Lampoon’s 1964 High School Yearbook.” 

Over the following decades, he became a familiar presence as a writer and on-air pundit. He covered war and unrest everywhere from El Salvador to the Philippines, while mocking “The Dictatorship of Boredom” back home. 

“In July 1988, I covered the specious, entropic, criminally trivial, boring stupid Democratic National Convention, a numb suckhole stuffed with political bulk filler held in that place where bad malls go to die, Atlanta,” reads a dispatch from “Parliament of Whores,” a bestseller published in 1991. “Then … I flew to that other oleo-high colonic, the Republican convention, an event with the intellectual content of a Guns N’ Roses lyric.”  

Like other longtime conservatives, O’Rourke’s loyalties were tested by the rise of Donald Trump. O’Rourke had little use for Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton in 2016, but he found he could live with her “lies and all her empty promises.” 

“It’s the second worst thing that can happen to this country. But she’s way behind in second place. I mean, she’s wrong about absolutely everything, but she’s wrong within normal parameters,” he said on NPR.  

“I mean, this man (Trump) just can’t be president,” he said. “They’ve got this button, you know, in the briefcase. He’s going to find it.” 

 
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