Yes, this is well out of my realm of normal criticism. Which just shows you how bad this has gotten this year.
As I quipped today – “Who designed our outfits? A band of hallucinating monkeys?!!”
First there were the widely panned Opening Ceremony outfits which were..well…frankly quite boring and not in the least representative of the USA. Frnech berets? What?
Heck, the Ralph Lauren POLO! symbol was bigger than the flag displayed. Tacky. Also, made in China. Double Fail.
I mean, as an example, the Swedish team’s attire that same night was also rather unattractive, but as my 1/2 Swedish teen stated “Well, those types of shirts are pretty popular over there.”
Back to the USA – have you seen what ALL the athletes wear for a medal ceremony? I’m calling it “Early 21st century formal prison attire”
The only thing that saves those outfits are the adorable girls wearing them with those gold medal winning smiles 🙂
On Sunday 15 and I were watching men’s water polo and all was going along fine until we saw it – Old Glory – not very well placed (or, VERY well placed depending on how you choose to look at it!):
Really – a nice flag on the SIDE would have been fine. The U-S-A across the back on a navy background is acceptable. But the stars and stripes up front? Aack!
But, today, that was surpassed. The men’s beach volleyball team today sported outfits that sent ripples of horror through twitter and Facebook. I was alerted to them by a friend describing them as “Norwegian curlers pants cut up into shorts”
My descriptions: “Golfers without clubs or a cart” “Jockeys without a horse” and I do completely agree with Norwegian Curling pants comparison. At any rate – YUCK.
On the upside if they win a medal they will cover those things up with the prison attire.
;-/
Trees & Flowers & Birds! 
French berets made in China, which the USOC paid a metric crapton of money for. That’s awesome. Way to go, USOC. (Yes, I’m sour on the whole Olamepic thing, mostly because I’m sick. to. death. of people bitching about the NBC coverage–which, I might add, NBC paid $1.5 billion dollars for–how many kids could have been fed or immunizations could have been administered for $1.5 billion?)
The volleyball uniforms look like Hot Dog On a Stick uniforms. The water polo uniforms, on the other hand, are juuuuuuuust fine. (I don’t know if this is actually true, but I read somewhere that IOC required male swimmers to go back to the brief-style trunks instead of the full body suits that were so popular in the last Olamepics.
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I really love the Ralph Lauren uniforms. It’s very classic American fashion. As for the berets and the endless “Eh, they’re French.” nonsense, does no one remember that the most elite of the US Army troops are known as the “Green Berets”? (and in fact within the last ten years, the beret is now standard in all US Army uniforms.)
But I will totally agree on the grey Nike jackets (and the burnt brown version is even worse). They are not flattering on anyone. This morning on TODAY, the women gymnastics team was wearing a much cooler jacket from Ralph Lauren which would have looked much better on the podium.
If we really wanted to be classy, we’d do something like what Great Britian has done. Across every sport, their uniforms have similar styling.
And certainly nothing wrong with those Water Polo outfits. Except that during the game, you can’t see them because only their head and shoulders are visible.
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