I thought she was being rude to a polite question and someone congratulating her for getting an olympic medal. If Michael Phelps had responded like that I’d call him a rude bastard.
It has nothing all at all to with her sex. To imply that my choice of words was sexist is going out of your way to find offense where obviously none was intended.
Well, maybe we can say the combination of the two did. If nobody had been riding the horse, you think it would have performed all the jumps by itself?
The Sphinx: We’re number 1! All others are numbered 2 and greater.
If you have a silver medal, you did not “win the event” (surpass all other contenders). But you did “win” (earn) a medal.
By any reasonable measure, winning any Olympic medal is a titanic accomplishment. Competing in the Olympics at all is a notable achievement.
So yes, it is seriously rude to “correct” someone who is offering congratulations for a “win,” when they haven’t explicitly mischaracterized it.
As others have said, if she went out with a realistic expectation of gold and “only” got the silver, that’s not going to feel like a win. And while you might say you “won a silver medal”, you wouldn’t say you’ve “won at the Olympics” if you got a silver - you came second. The interviewer makes it sound like she said it in a pissy way but that’s second-hand. We can’t know whether, for example, she wanted to make sure she wasn’t being given credit for something she didn’t achieve - perhaps the writer mistook her for someone in the British equestrian team who did win a gold medal, and she wanted to make sure that person was recognised.
Don’t worry - you won the silver.
31 young for an Olympic equestrian. There are Olympic equestrians in their 60s and 70s.
Zara should be grateful that she didn’t fall on her ass like her mom did at Montreal 1976.
Silver medal is nothing to act pissy about. Especially a couple weeks later.
I think it’s seriously rude to congratulate someone for winning when they didn’t win. “A win” means first place, not second. If she were congratulated for winning a silver, then you’d have a point.
She came off as a girl with poor sportsmanship, that’s for sure.
The news media and PR firms say, “_____ won a silver medal…” or whatever. The reporter wasn’t out of line. The ‘winner’ of the sliver medal was.
Get your facts right? What a brat.
Now that I think about it, she just sounds like a spoiled royal.* Waah waaah.
*yeah, I know, just the granddaughter, but you know what I mean
Yes. Congratulating her for winning a silver medal = factually correct. Congratulating her for doing well in the Olympics = factually correct regardless of whether she thinks she should have done better. Congratulating her “for her Olympic win” = factually incorrect. Correcting the mistake = a Doper candidate.
She takes after her mother and her grandfather.
The term ‘win’ has more than one meaning.
To win a contest/race/competition usually means to take first place, but in other contexts, it simply means to gain something, often through effort - and so there can be multiple winners.
For example, a scholarship may comprise awards for more than one student - each one that qualifies has won a scholarship, a lottery may have multiple jackpot winners, and in the Olympics, one may win a bronze, silver or gold medal - only the gold medalist has won the event, but all three have won a medal.
I don’t think she’s being rude. I think she’s trying to ensure, the person who won the gold medal, gets their due. She may be more meticulous about it as a royal, not wanting her celebrity to obscure any of the limelight the gold medalist righteously earned. That’d be a fine line for anyone to walk, I should think.
I remember years ago legendary Rugby League coach Jack Gibson said of Grand Finals (the league equivalent to a Super Bowl), “If you win one you have the greatest few days of your life and then it’s over. If you lose one you are haunted by the memories for the rest of your life. I don’t know that it’s a fair deal.”
This is what I was trying to say in my post. You said it better, thanks.
The exact description of the congratulations offered was,
Let’s assume that even without exact quotations for all parts of the exchange, this is an accurate rendering. (That may not be the case, but that’s the text we have to work with.)
Notice that Zara Phillips herself apparently refers to a medal win. She acknowledges, in the next breath, that the word “win” does not always refer strictly to first place. Given that this was an Olympic medal, I think Tim Walker was colloquially correct to refer to it as an Olympic [medal] win.
So I stand by the reckoning that the form of her “correction” was inappropriate given that he made no explicit error in the description of the event for which he was offering congratulations.
Anyway, “get your facts right” comes across as ungracious at best even if he had made an explicit error. She did have a medal to be proud of, so the proper form of response would have been, “thank you, but I’m afraid it is only a silver medal; the overall winner was --.”
Yep. You beat everyone else that came in behind you. Looking at it in any other way is disrespectful to yourself and all the other competitors, and shows a really sorry sense of self-worth.
As I once said to a friend who was very gloomy when Finland had finished second in ice hockey, “You have to admit that it is much more glorious to win the bronze medal, like Sweden did, than to lose the gold, like Finland did”.