Follow the dress code or be kicked out of the Games

This is not directly related to skating, but I want to share newer movements among a couple Sports Associations in Japan, which can have influence on other sports including skating.

The SAJ (Ski Association of Japan?) has announced that the athletes cannot get national financial support or attend the Olympics unless they sign the agreement form that bans hair dye and piercing etc.
http://headlines.yahoo.co.jp/hl?a=20100324-00000121-jij-spo

This new policy reflects an incident in which an Olympian snowboarder was heavily criticized by the public for dressing the official uniform casually at the airport going to the recent Olympics.
The left pic was seen as "problematic":
http://headlines.yahoo.co.jp/hl?a=20100308-00000009-san-l04.view-000
The incident resulted in the Olympian being banned from attending the Opening Ceremony and a couple officials resigning from their positions.

The Japanese Swimming Association had also started a similar policy.

I am hoping that the Japanese Skating Federation will not join this movement. I speculate that Speed Skating would have no problem with this policy. But FS has a totally different culture as a sport.

Miki will be surely out with that long decorative nail:sheesh: Only Oda and Mao can stay.

Oh yeah. It was ridiculous. Even his mom had to apologize for the way he dressed. :disapp:

This is just ridiculous

Bennett said:

Miki will be surely out with that long decorative nail:sheesh:

Click to expand...

She doesn't use them anymore!

I think that this is like an extreme form of group responsibility stemming from a combination of two things:

1. Olympians are under public scrutiny as representatives of the nation.

2. The authority has to take responsibility for individual behaviors of their subordinates in that culture. This is pretty universal practice within that culture (oops, perhaps except for the Emperor!).

Note that some officials actually resigned from their positions for the incident. In order to avoid culpability affecting them for such small little stupid things that they are not really responsible for, they decided to take preventive measures for the future.

I would not be surprised if the Japanese Olympic Committee decides to spread this policy among other sports associations just to retreat to safe ground. It's basically a disclaimer, working as a defensive mechanism to protect the organizations.

Japan is overall very restrictive about that things. I've also heard that at high school they can't dye their hair or wear piercings either.

Bennett said:

The left pic was seen as "problematic":

http://headlines.yahoo.co.jp/hl?a=20100308-00000009-san-l04.view-000

Click to expand...

He's a handsome dude either way!

Appears to me the guy was going for a definitive "look" - snowboard chic.
Not sure he accomplished it, but seems as if he went to great effort to look trendy-sloppy.

Asking people to wear a uniform is one thing, but banning hair dye and piercings means that people cannot look the way they want. That is too much.