Final Word from Monday, August 13, 2012



Strong medal counts at the London Olympics by the U.S. and the U.K. show that Western models of training and funding sports can still compete against the Chinese and fading Soviet models. For Czechs, one of the big questions now is whether the success of this year's Olympics can be repeated after the retirement of the athletes and coaches who grew to greatness thanks to the Communist-era system. Over the past 20 years, Czechs have been mainly world-calibre in the theft of national assets, which must eventually show up in such quotidian affairs as sports. With the big and little godfathers now controlling so much of the economy, a sports infrastructure that doesn't benefit from this enormous concentration of wealth is going to be short-changed. Success at future Olympics is more in the hands of this state within a state than the ČSTV sports union or the Czech Olympic Committee.[Czech Republic Five Families Summer]

Glossary of difficult words

medal count - the number of medals won by each country, usually depicted as a chart;

to fade - to gradually grow faint and disappear;

quotidian - ordinary or everyday;

short-changed - treated unfairly by having something of value withheld.

Contact

Tel: 420 224 221 580
E-mail: info@fleet.cz

Published by

E.S. Best s.r.o.
Ovenecká 78/33
170 00 Prague 7
Czech Republic

Subscribe

Unsubscribe


FS Final Word
close