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Keywords: Olympics

  • AUSTRALIA

    The Paralympics as a work in progress

    • Michael Mullins
    • 03 September 2012
    5 Comments

    The Paralympics opening ceremony shows how far we've come in reversing the exclusion of disabled athletes. But they encourage physically disabled athletes at the expense of the intellectually disabled. 

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  • CARTOON

    And in the Preferred Prime Minister event...

    • Fiona Katauskas
    • 08 August 2012

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Olympics silver whining

    • Various
    • 07 August 2012

    Our species believes it progresses without limitation. We shout when a swimmer wins silver, 'That's no inspiration'. As humans pound forward, no 'burden of care' limitation ... We deserve only winners, our species the sole inspiration.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The Olympics and business world need to grow up

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 06 August 2012
    9 Comments

    The Olympic Games see many thousands of mainly young athletes from all around the world competing for a hundred or so medals. So the point of the exercise can't be to win. It is to lose. Or rather the Games are a school for learning how to lose and so grow in humanity.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The opposite of Australian swimming hubris

    • John Honner
    • 01 August 2012
    10 Comments

    The Spit Baths consist of two swimming areas bounded by boardwalks built on piles sunk into Middle Harbour. At low tide there is barely enough water to swim in. Olympic medallist John Devitt does time trials in just a few feet of water. There is no black line on a sterile tiled floor, just sand and seaweed.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    What's the point of the Olympics?

    • Fatima Measham
    • 01 August 2012
    16 Comments

    The games are an escapist spectacle, where the flags of Iran, Palestine and Syria flutter without irony alongside those of the US, Israel and Turkey, and delegates from Spain and Greece wave as if their nation's economies have not fractured the Eurozone. The dissonance between the games and reality has become hard to ignore.

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  • CARTOON

    Gillard's games

    • Fiona Katauskas
    • 01 August 2012
    1 Comment

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Olympic torch should shine on athletes not nations

    • Michael Mullins
    • 30 July 2012
    14 Comments

    Nationalism is the scourge of the modern Olympics. We slide too easily from speaking of 'how our athletes are doing' to 'how we are doing'. We should consider discontinuing national anthems and medal tallies and even introduce a fixed host city.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Beyond the Liesel Jones fat spat

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 27 July 2012
    7 Comments

    The brutal media critique of swimmer Liesel Jones on the eve of the Olympics was typical of society's tendency to chew up and spit out its heroes once it deems them to be no longer useful. If it dented her confidence, Jones may have taken strength from Australia's first ever international sports champion.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Lingerie football's naked sexism

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 08 June 2012
    18 Comments

    The largely positive response in Australia to the American Lingerie Football League reveals we are not the progressively egalitarian people we imagine ourselves to be. We give lip service to female equality, but women will still be exploited whenever the opportunity arises, and feminists vilified like it's 1972.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    WikiLeaks and artistic freedom in China

    • Tony Smith
    • 14 December 2010
    6 Comments

    While WikiLeaks' exposures of US government secrets have created a media storm, the case of Chinese Artist Ai Weiwei, which reveals much about the authorities in China, has attracted little comment. China has moved towards capitalism but not democracy.

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  • RELIGION

    Reconciling religion, politics and human rights

    • Frank Brennan
    • 04 November 2010
    15 Comments

    Cardinal Pell, with whom I have voiced disagreement, preached superbly at the mass of thanksgiving after the canonisation of Mary MacKillop. 'She does not deter us from struggling to follow her.' As we wrestle with the common good, let's make a place for all our fellow citizens.

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