Imagine the excitement of making it to the Olympics. Finally achieving the goal that an entire life’s training has led up to. Finally getting to represent one’s homeland in the athletic competition of the world. Now imagine the horror of making it the Olympics and then getting kicked off the team. What could possibly be so bad that it would lead to elimination? Cheating? Drugs? Violence? No. Tweeting. This is reality for Greek Olympian Voula Papachristou, who was set to compete in the triple jump at the London 2012 Olympic Games, but never got the chance to do so. Papachristou was removed from her team because of a racial joke she made on Twitter that translates to, “With so many Africans in Greece…at least the West Nile mosquitoes will eat homemade food.” While the joke is bad, the social media rules for the Olympics were actually not broken by it. The decision to remove Papachristou from the team was made by her team independently, not by the International Olympic Committee (IOC). As for the rest of the Greek Olympic team, they now have even stricter social media rules than the rest and are forbidden to tweet or post about anything unrelated to the games at all for the remainder of the games.
Papachristou took to Twitter again to apologize for the tweet saying, “”I am thankful to my coach and family and so many other people who have stuck by me…. After so many years of hurt and sacrifices to try and get to my first Olympics I am very bitter and upset. But what has upset me the most is the excessive reaction and speed of the disciplinary decision.” Her apologies fell on deaf ears however since the decision to ban Papachristou was irreversible.
Not alone in her suffering, Papachristou was joined by a second Olympic athlete who was removed from the games, this time from Switzerland. Twenty-three year old Michel Morganella, who played soccer for Switzerland, was kicked off the team after a loss to South Korea prompted him to tweet that he wanted to beat up the South Koreans and that they “should burn” and that they are a “bunch of mongoloids.” Morganella also apologized for his tweet, trying to explain that it was in the “heat of defeat” that he made those comments, but again, the decision to remove him from the team was irreversible.
Racially charged tweets such as these are in violation of the IOC’s code of ethics and do not represent the values that the Olympic games want to present. For these reasons, many people are backing the decisions made by Greece and Switzerland for expelling their athletes. While the disappointment may be unbearable for athletes that have trained their whole lives to make it to the Olympics, hopefully they have learned that social media can take away a gold medal just as quickly as a fellow Olympian can.