Beating a Dead Horse

TW: Cynical, yes (Taibbi tends to be that way) but it bears some truth.

From Matt Taibbi's blog:
"They are gathering again at a Winter Olympics, now aging cold warriors.

Thirty years ago, they played a game that has been called the greatest upset in Olympic history, a David-vs.-Goliath tale, a political metaphor, a miracle.

That’s how many Americans remember the hockey game played at the Lake Placid Olympics on Feb. 22, 1980, when a group of mostly college kids defeated the mighty team from the Soviet Union, which had dominated the sport for most of the previous two decades.

But what went through the minds of those red-clad players, who watched in stunned disbelief as the Americans celebrated the “Miracle on Ice” at the other end of the rink?

The hawkish features of goalie Vladislav Tretiak turned soft and he smiled slightly as he was reminded of the painful anniversary. But he brushed the memory aside as easily as one of the many thousands of shots he turned away in his Hall of Fame career.

My old friend Simon in Moscow sent me this and wrote:

AP: “Russians play down ‘Miracle on Ice’ 30 years later.” What kind of headline and story is that? How about a piece titled “Tatar-Mongols play down the Kulikovo battle 629 years later”?

I’m with him on this. Seriously, can we get over ourselves about the Miracle on Ice? It was great and all, but you hear about it every five minutes in this country. I lived in Russia for 10 years and didn’t even once hear about a bunch of Soviets with hideous mustaches whipping the asses of David Robinson, Danny Manning and Mitch Richmond in basketball in Seoul in ‘88. I heard a lot about the 1972 thing, but that was only in the context of Russians being so amused by how much we whined about getting jobbed by the refs.

I mean really, whatever happened to acting like you’ve been there before? I’m trying to imagine what the citizen of someplace like Liechtenstein or Reunion Island thinks when he sees Americans keeping a 30-year boner over the image of themselves as longshot underdogs who beat the odds."
http://trueslant.com/matttaibbi/2010/02/23/ap-russians-still-sucking-on-miracle-on-ice/