http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2008/au ... mpics20081
Spain's Olympic basketball teams have risked upsetting their Chinese hosts by posing for a pre-Games advert making slit-eyed gestures. The advert for a courier company, which is an official sponsor of the Spanish Basketball Federation, occupied a full page in the sports daily Marca, the country's best-selling newspaper.
The advert features two large photographs, one of the men's basketball team, below, and one of the women's team. Both squads pose in full Olympic kit on a basketball court decorated with a picture of a Chinese dragon. Every single player appears pulling back the skin on either side of their eyes. The advert carries the symbol of the sport's governing body.
A personal comment:
Clearly in poor taste. Now, if this picture featured models and not a basketball team, I'd tend to fault the photographer and advertising agency more than the models. Indeed, I'd probably find the newspaper at fault for running the ad as well.
But this does not absolve the team. They could have refused to take this picture. I'm sure a number of people, from the time of the ad's conception through acceptance at the newspaper, could have objected to it along the way as well, but the athletes were certainly in the right position to say no -- and they didn't. That just makes them part of the problem.
Glancing at some of the pages on the incident, a number of bloggers/writers seem to think that this is par-for-the-course for Spanish athletics. I couldn't say. But this was clearly a bad move all around, no matter what its intentions were.