Eddie the Eagle was unqualified to compete and an insult to the real, trained athletes. He is the reason they don't let the only competitor from a country compete now. You have to go through qualifying rounds. He took the attention away from the other athletes cause he was like watching a train wreck.
shareMore of a light drama
shareAgree with the OP. I vividly remember when this guy was "competing" in the Olympic Games. It came off mostly as a pathetic attempt at cheap publicity. I remember many athletes at those Games saying that this competition was something they had trained incredibly hard for over a bunch of years. And then this joker, who had not truly trained, was turning the competition into a farce. A lot of the commentators who initially thought it was funny had a change of opinion on him as well.
And sure enough here we are many years later and the guy is being touted in a film as a folk hero. He wasn't.
You have to respect him for going after his dream, and never giving up.
shareim pretty sure he trained hard for too , he actually beat some other skiers in other competitions.
shareI compete at a reasonably high level in a sport and I would also be rather annoyed by some upstart turning up without training properly (as many have done in my sport).
However, he did help to make a point which has still not really been realised by many sportsmen around today. The other competitors felt robbed because he was getting the attention which they felt they deserved and they thought their image would be damaged for having competed against him. If you care so much about the attention and your own image and if, dare I say, you take the sport too seriously, then you deserve to be made a bit of a fool of.
The most important thing is not the publicity, but the taking part and the winning.
So you would be annoyed by someone not training as hard as you and beating you? Maybe not sucking at what you do in your reasonably high level sport would help. If you take issue with someone simply being better than you I would suggest you are not ready for it you Mary.
shareYou seem to have misread my post, which is odd. I said a reasonably high level, not that I am the best in the world, so of course I am able to cope with people being better than me and I can appreciate raw talent. This is completely beside the point because the one thing Eddie was lacking was talent for the event.
shareIn reality he trained for 20 months and was completing 60 jumps a day.
shareIs the point of the Olympics to get attention, or to perform/compete to the best of one's ability?
The quote from Pierre de Coubertin says it pretty well, I think: "The most important thing in the Olympic Games is not winning but taking part."
While I get your point - if the most important thing in the Olympics was really not winning but just taking part, wouldn't they open it up to more athletes?
Why limit it only to the select few if its not really about winning?
See you suckers in Rio!
While I get your point - if the most important thing in the Olympics was really not winning but just taking part, wouldn't they open it up to more athletes?
Why limit it only to the select few if its not really about winning?
it is a strange story. having failed to get into the downhill skiing team (and he was apparently a good skier), he decided to enter for an event for which he had no ability whatsoever. but he was allowed to qualify despite his total lack of ability, so at least some of the blame must go to those who allowed him to qualify. Apparently the rules have been changed since then to make it more difficult, but at the time he was considered good enough. it seems he just wanted to compete, that he had no chance at all of winning didn't matter. his courage is admirable though, it certainly took a lot of nerve to do those jumps with so little esperience. That he managed to do the jumps at all is quite impressive.
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Eddie trained beyond the limits of his finances unlike those anally retentive 'Professionals' who are pampered with State Sponsoring in the pursuit of 'Winning at all costs' mainly to the detriment of the Olympic Spirit which Eddie embodied.
shareHe did qualify, until they changed the rules
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