'Olympic Athletes from Russia' is as clumsy as the ridiculous compromise that produced the euphemism
- In late 2014, Russia was implicated in a long-term, state-sanctioned, systemic sports doping scandal.
- This prompted the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to suspend Russia from the Winter Games.
- But the IOC still allowed certain Russian athletes to compete — an outcome that satisfied no one.
In Pyeongchang, Russian Olympic athletes aren't Russian Olympic athletes. Rather, they're "Olympic Athletes from Russia" — OAR, for short.
Athletes, commentators, and spectators at the 2018 Pyeongchang Games have been struggling to process and deploy the unnatural terminology all week. "Olympic Athletes from Russia" is an octosyllabic mess that's hard to say and hard to understand. The euphemism is as clumsy as the compromise that produced it.See the rest of the story at Business Insider
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