Recently I’ve been watching the Olympics a lot on tv. Like most Canadians, I’m a little disappointed at the lack of success of our athletes. There has been a lot of talk from the athlete and pundits alike about the reasons for this, but I’m convinced that the main reasons are lack of funding and the Canadian Olympic Committee’s decision to not send athletes in all the events we qualified for — in other words, the COC set the bar higher than the International Olympic Committee. Ostensibly the decision was made so that we don’t have a lot of athletes competing and failing, as we are sending only our top medal hopefuls, but I’m sure it’s really just a cost cutting measure. And you never know when an athlete will have a really good day, perform a personal best, and perhaps win a surprise medal.
In general, I think we need to support our athletes more, or stop complaining that we don’t do very well at the Olympics. Of course it’s an unfair comparison to make looking at the US Olympic success, but a better comparison is with Australia, which is comparable in size and resources, and has recently become one of the top Olympic countries. In any case, I’m enjoying watching the Olympics in spite of Canada’s difficulties.
Watching the Olympics has also allowed me to become reacquainted with some vocabulary that I only seem to encounter during the Olympics, such as peloton and repechage. A peloton is the small clump of cyclists that follows the leader in a bike race. According to the OED, peloton comes from French peloton, and ultimately from Latin pilotta, a diminutive form of pila ‘ball’. It’s interesting to note that the OED does not list this sports usage of the word, listing only two senses: “1. A small ball or spherical mass. Obs. rare” and “2. A small body of soldiers; = platoon”. Perhaps this will be updated in the third edition.
The term repechage, on the other hand, is only a sports term in English. It comes from the French repêchage, from the verb repêcher ‘to fish out, rescue; to give an examination candidate a second chance to pass’, and is defined by the OED as “an extra contest in which the runners-up in the eliminating contests compete for a place in the final”. Both interesting words with interesting etymologies. Isn’t language fun?
Posted by Mark at August 19, 2004 05:13 PM