Little rant

Hey everyone, i just wanted to add a little thought to caroline's comment about why i chose the medalists. as you might know i come from this very unimportant, 15 million big country formerly known as the German Democratic Republic (GDR). This country struggled 40 years to get international recognition and it had chosen one field by which to reach that: sports. So from the 60's forward ALL efforts were focused on sports to show that the GDR was SOMEone. Now nowadays everyone is like oh yeah, east germans were successful because they were doping. i am not saying they didn't but not more so than any other country. the real success came with the complete focus of a whole country on one thing: success in sports. so from a very early stage we had talent scouts combing school classes for all sorts of sports disciplines and the kids were than taken out and put into sports schools with one on one school lessons and training in the afternoon. but the most important thing: sports schools were situated close to universities and the newest methods in psychology, ways of training, rotations, really anything were almost immediately passed on to the actual athletes close by, so they tried to be one step ahead. in this light east germans are VERY passionate about sports and the olympic games were always a landmark. usually we came in in third place behind the USSR and US. which is, taken the size of the country, remarkable i find. so athletes were heroes and still are. everyone for example still remembers Kati Witt's performance of Carmen (she went to the same school i did by the way) and Frank Peter Roetsch's success in Biathlon (another Sport Germans are crazy about). After the wall came down the sport system was destroyed, or reshaped i should say, but still, in these days, three quarters of olympic athletes come from the east while only one tenth of the population is east german.
i just wanted to add that... as you can see it touches me closely :)
(the picture: This is the whole sports complex in my school in Chemnitz (formerly Karl-Marx-Stadt). Katarina Witt went here and Michael Ballack was in my class. It is really interesting, you should come visit!!)