Why Michael Phelps isn’t a waste of food

TERRY PRONE (August 18) puts forth a very strange view of the Olympic Games and of those people who enjoy watching them.

She suggests that by reporting Michael Phelps’s diet, journalists have promoted obesity and the profligate waste of food.

Am I the only person to have read this with incredulity? Michael Phelps eats 12,000 calories a day because he trains and swims all day and, due to his muscle mass, burns far more calories than the person on the street.

That is all that can be or should be said about Michael Phelps’s food intake. Ms Prone’s remarks should be seen as a damning indictment of journalists rather than any rational comment on the Olympics.

Your columnist suggests that winning margins of “a fraction of a percentage point of a second... is triumph of electronic measurement rather than human achievement”.

In fact, winning by a fingertip proves this is a human achievement in this age of more ‘professional’ sports people.

The top performers have access to the best their countries can provide in terms of coaches, nutritionists, psychologists, etc, to reach the human body’s performance limit, so winning by a fingertip or a split second is only to be expected.

Ms Prone questions Phelps’s humanity as all he does all day, all year is train to win medals and she wonders “what aspect of humanity does this express or validate?”

It expresses the human desire to achieve and validates the effort that some people can devote to realising their ambitions, be it winning an Olympic gold medal or achieving the highest Leaving Cert results in the country.

Each requires a certain amount of innate ability combined with sacrifice, dedication and hard work, which Ms Prone suggests is inhuman.

Apparently those billions of ‘gullible’ viewers around the world watching the Olympics are being fooled — but surely if that is the case your columnist should be holding the organisers up as great exponents of her own art. To quote a definition of public relations: “Public relations (PR) is the practice of managing the flow of information between an organisation and its public. PR aims to gain an organisation or individual positive exposure to their key stakeholders, while downplaying any negative exposures and dealing with complaints.”

I shall indulge my ‘gullibility’ and continue to watch the Olympics coverage to the very end — and I can honestly say that I have watched nearly all of the sports, including those I don’t understand. I don’t watch Big Brother or Fáilte Towers because I don’t like that kind of programme, but I don’t pass judgment on those who do.

Neither should Ms Prone.

Karen McDonnell

Bweeng

Co Cork