There have been worse mistakes in the history of the Olympics.
Take the South African boxer Thomas Hamilton-Brown, who went on a sorrows-drowning eating binge after losing at the 1936 Olympics.
A day later he found out there had been a scoring error and that he was in the next round. More than two kilos overweight at the weigh-in, he was disqualified.
But none are as predictable as the one this morning made by olympic.org, the official Olympics website, which greeted fans of sailing with the headline “Windsurfing honours go to French and Danish sailors.”
Dorian the Dane
“Add another gong to the Danish tally!” came the chorus from the media, followed by: “Men’s windsurfing … Dorian Van Rijsselberghe. Doesn’t sound very Danish … or male.”
Mixing up the Dutch and the Danish has been the preserve of quality journalism since the advent of Johannes Gutenberg.
Back in 2012, it was revealed that the LA Times had made the error at least seven times in six years.
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It’s a routine mistake that every foreign resident of Denmark asked “How’s your Dutch coming along?” can testify to.
