Death at Sochi: Time to Give it a Rest?


I thought maybe I was the only one who was getting a little annoyed by this, but apparently not:

Nate Carlisle, a reporter at the Salt Lake Tribune, the hometown paper of many ski and snowboard athletes, has been running a spreadsheet calculating the number of stories featuring competitors’ dead relatives. Through Saturday, Carlisle found, there had been 25 such stories, an average of nearly three per day. On Sunday night the death preoccupation continued when NBC’s Christin Cooper prodded Bode Miller, after he won bronze in the Super-G, on the loss of his brother, prompting the skier to fall to the ground in tears and the Twittersphere to light up.

Carlisle’s spreadsheet is here. He’s now up to 29, and that’s not even counting all the tearjerking stories that stop short of death (Alex Bilodeau’s brother with cerebral palsy, for example). I get that this stuff might appeal more to other people than it does to me, but come on. Enough’s enough. We shouldn’t pretend that tragedy and pain are what motivate most athletes, or that they somehow give athletic accomplishments more depth and meaning. There are plenty of other ways to humanize the winners and losers at Sochi.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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