I was really just kidding and looking for an opportunity to amuse myself making salacious comments when I said Tom Brady should have filmed something other than the Jets practice, but I did find the new sports spying story ironic in light of that. Apparently the Danish women's soccer team was holding a strategy session in a hotel conference room, and they all found it curious that there was a giant mirror in the room, like a police interrogation room, and some jokes were made about the Chinese having cameras on the other side to spy on the nefarious Danish soccer team. After having a big laugh, they discovered that there were in fact two Chinese soccer officials spying on their team meeting. This is funny (and sad) for several reasons, one being that a global power with nuclear weapons who allegedly recently tried to hack the Pentagon would turn out to be so bad at spying on people. Didn't they see Die Another Day when James Bond breaks the mirror in his Hong Kong hotel room because he's been on to the Chinese spying on him through it for like 40 years? What are they, the great and powerful Oz, begging Dorothy to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain?
It's also kind of funny to me that these magnificently fit women, all in the prime of their youth and in peak physical condition would hit town, under the all-seeing eye of the Chinese government, and when they went too far, this is the best excess they could come up with. There are certainly different cultural cliches to consider, but when I heard female athletes were being spied on, I remembered that basically every other time I've heard that in America, it wasn't secret cameras in the team meeting, it was holes drilled into the walls of the locker room. The mythical women's locker room that lurks in the fantasy life of the American male, in which lithe female athletes experience a permanent shortage of towels and air dry while they massage each other's sore muscles and rub lotion on each other's bodies until getting carried away experimenting sexually in a steamy group shower... apparently that fantasy doesn't rank so high in the Chinese mind. Seriously China, if you're going to invade people's privacy, couldn't you come up with anything better than checking out marking assignments on corner kicks?
FIFA's reaction is the truly sad part... they suspended Denmark's coach. He said some things they found intolerable, but frankly, unless he threatened to rape their children, I can't think of anything he could have said that I would find objectionable when said in response to FIFA's decision to ignore the issue. As I said before, quoting David Stern, the entire point of sport is that everyone agrees to a set of rules and limitations, and I believe this is what separates sport from other competitions (like seeing who can roll the most tanks through Belgium) and makes it one of the safety valves of world culture. If the Chinese don't get that it's a game, why are we even bothering to play with them? I would guess FIFA's decision almost certainly has to do with a lucrative Olympic soccer tournament on the horizon and an ongoing tournament, but if they ever host another soccer event after skating on this, FIFA and the Asian Football Confederation are nuts.
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