It’s one of the quirks of the Olympics. The amount of mainstream media interest means that once every four years, you get all sorts of papers and publications you’d never expect reporting on snowboarding. And you see articles that come at our sport from angles you’d never dreamed possible.
This year we’ve already had the Daily Fail reporting the “breaking news story” of Kiwi shredder Possum Torr’s tweeting that she wanted to hook up with the Jamaican bobsled team and US Weekly talking about Jamie Anderson’s dating arrangements.
Yesterday our very own Jenny Jones spent about an hour on the phone answering questions from the likes of Grazia and OK Magazine. But this has to be our favourite gossip rag story of all so far – Iouri Podladtchikov apparently has a crush on Kate Moss.
When you think about it, it’s the perfect tabloid fodder isn’t it? Olympic gold medallist admits to fancying the hell out of legendary super-model? He’s got a penchant for living like rock star, she’s been busted err behaving like a rockstar… Seriously, that’s the sort of thing that TMZ headline writers’ dreams are made of.
It was the sort of thing that TMZ headline writers’ dreams are made of.
The whole thing (which was reported not only on salacious gossip sites but also by the Australian Herald Sun and ABC News) was based on three quotes that I-Pod gave in his post run press conference.
“I don’t want to be on the cover of Vogue,” he said. Before joking “it is a big dream to take a photo of Kate Moss!” He then mentioned her name again before being asked about his signature Yolo flip, and said: “The original story of the YOLO trick was that I was trying to impress a girl. Another funny thing is that she asked me why didn’t I call the trick after her. I mean … what do you have to do to impress a girl? If she was Kate Moss I would have named it after her.”
Of course they mainstream media could have reported on what the Yolo actually was, or how impressive it was actually landing it cleanly in that pipe, but why let boring stuff like that get in the way of a juicy story?
Why indeed.
If you’ve got any other excellent and/or awful examples of mainstream media coverage from these games please let us know in the comments below, cos we’ll be doing a round-up of all our favourite/least-favourite moments.
