The athletes from the rest of the world, especially Europe, just stood about bemused
Many years ago I went to the international sales conference of our US based multinational, in a golf resort in Tampa
It was a great event with some very good presentations and interactions, but then on the final day we had a keynote address on the subject of Teamwork, with a proper all american real life Top Gun type ex-fighter pilot. He was very eloquent and polished and managed to vaguely stay on topic by saying he could never have done what he did without the support of his ground crew and mechanics and so on – so we all have a part to play that is valuable, etc.
It’s the “What I did” bit of his presentation that was majorly – I don’t even know the word really? Somewhere in the triangle between bemusing, offensive and ‘ground please swallow me up this is so uncomfortable’. Because he illustrated his talk with tales of combat in Vietnam and how many gooks and commies and etc he’d killed which made him one of the top confirmed combat kill guys in history. While (some of, to be fair some were as shocked as we were) americans were teary eyed, hands on hearts, whooping and hollering….. our Russian and Vietnamese colleagues were distinctly less amused.
Oh, and he did it all while wearing a stars and stripes shirt just to confirm how great murica is.