Canadian Women act like men, get told off

The Canadian Women's Ice Hockey team at the Winter Olympics defeated local rivals the USA to win the gold medals for the event. According to Yahoo! News, what followed was a censure for their celebration - of swigging beer and smoking a cigar each.

Now, it is true that when male sports stars celebrate in "exuberant" fashion, there is a certain amount of wrist-slapping that follows, and the nation gets to "tut-tut" for a while. But seriously: the equivalent event in 2005 in cricket saw the male stars of the England team get plastered all night long, and turn up drunk to meet the Queen, and what most people really felt was "good on 'em, they deserve to have a good time!" A few years earlier, star of the show Mark Butcher admitted in the post-match interview to having a ciggie break during the only match England won against Australia that year (although he then said "probably shouldn't have said that!")

So 70 minutes of goofing about with booze and cigars seems small beer by comparison (colloquialism chosen deliberately!) Indeed, the spokesman for the Canadian Olympic Committee said it was not an uncommon form of celebration.

It's hard to know whether or not the issue here is the IOC being over-officious about the whole thing, trying against all reason to maintain an ultra-squeaky-clean veneer to the games' image, or whether it really is an over-reaction because instead of men behaving like this, it's a women's team doing it instead. Perhaps the most telling point is that the incident mentioned in the Yahoo! News article of Jon Montgomery swigging a large pitcher of beer, it's hard to find an article anywhere criticising him for his behaviour. The reaction searching Google News is much more circumspect to the women's celebration (a choice one came from a US domain name containing the word "republican", you can imagine what that was like!)

One cannot help but feel that it is the fact that this is "unladylike" behaviour that factors into these criticisms (and playing ice hockey in the first place ISN'T unladylike!?) and not a genuine "horror" that successful sports stars act like everyone else when they celebrate a victory. (I have a vision now of sports stars putting on bibs that read "Enjoy Alcohol Responsibly" before celebrating...)

One other thing: I found an article from The Ottawa Citizen claiming that Canadian women outscore the men in medals because they have equal funding for their sports. I can't speak to how true that is, but the article's interview comments are interesting. I also don't buy the story that if there were equal numbers of men and women the medal-count would necessarily even out because "due to sheer numbers, it is far tougher to rise to the top as a male than it is as a female". Seems to me it may be the case in an individual nation, but once you're at the top, to win international competitions you still have to be able to beat the best of the best from every other nation as well.