Phelps phlap -- the consequences of being born in the U.S.A.

You have to feel a bit sorry for Michael Phelps because he is an American olympic champion. He was outed for smoking a bong at a party and now there is an enormous morality play going on in the U.S. that has seen him suspended from competition and losing millions in corporate sponorships.

If he had been Canadian this would barely have rated a ripple.

Witness Ross Rebagliati, Canada's gold medal snowboarding winner in the 1998 winter olympics in Nagano, Japan. After taking the gold, olympic lab tests revealed that Ross had traces of marijuana in his blood. Since nobody could make an argument that marijuana is a "performance enhancing" drug, he kept his medal.


At home, Canadians did a collective shoulder shrug and chuckled. The media consensus was that there was something called a "snowboarding culture" amongst young people and smoking dope was part of it.

Chinese junkets and political disconnect from reality

Barack Obama made a telling comment about politicians in his book The Audacity of Hope. The longer one is in office, he said, "the narrower the scope of your interactions.

"You may fight it with town-hall meetings and listening tours and stops by the old neighbourhood, but your schedule dictates that you move in a different orbit from most of the people you represent."

This comes to mind in the face of the obstinacy of the mayor of Toronto, David Miller, and the Ontario government, insisting on going to China when the rest of the world is rioting every time the Chinese militarily-guarded Olympic flame passes through a new city on its global "good will" tour.

I once was a member of a board of directors of an international organization that held annual meetings in different cities in the world. It was an honour competed for and, like the Olympics, a city applied and was awarded the right to host the event several years in advance. A few months before the meeting was to be held in Beijing, the Tiananmen Square massacre occurred. We switched the venue to another city in Europe on short notice. China put a lot of pressure on us to keep it in Beijing, but we rejected it.

This is a time to seriously consider boycotting the games, not trotting off on junkets that will only be used by the Chinese authorities as evidence that the Tibet business makes no difference to anyone outside China.