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Notes -
Even with a cursory watch of the Olympics, this seems ridiculous on its face. Most athletes still look very much like natives.
Picking a random Euro country, here are France's current gold medalists:
Their best performer, Leon Marchand, is as French as you can get.
How on earth is this the point at which you give up on a 100+ years institution that glorifies all of individual excellence, team work, and national pride.
I think a lot of the wehraboos are still salty about '36.
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None of the track-and-field events - sprinting, marathon, long jump, etc. - have given out medals yet. Neither has basketball. Those are the sports that people are talking about when they point to the Summer Olympics specifically having lost a lot of its national specificity; that’s where you’re going to see a lot of people of obviously African ancestry competing under various non-African national flags.
Your point is valuable, though. Those of us on the racialist right often overstate the pervasiveness of the phenomenon we’re pointing to. There are, in fact, still a great many successful Olympians with deep ethnic roots in the respective countries they’re representing. We’re nowhere near the point where you turn on the Olympics and everyone is African, which is the impression one would get if one only follows Olympic commentary on right-wing Twitter.
Hear hear!
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