Threatening to cut a sport from the Olympics due solely to lopsided scores contradicts the Olympic motto, and anyone who writes on this subject without bringing up this contradiction is complicit in the hypocrisy. The Olympic motto "Citius, Altius, Fortius" roughly translated means "faster, higher, stronger" -- it does not translate to "don't be too fast, too high, or too strong, or else all the young athletes who look up to you will have their Olympic dreams denied." You simply cannot run a legitimate sporting event when individual competitors have any incentive to avoid doing their best, and I'm disappointed that more journalists don't express moral outrage over Jacques Rogge's threats to cut women's ice hockey due to lopsided scores, on par with the outrage reserved for match fixing or point shaving. And journalists should have expressed the same kind of outrage when lopsided scores were offered as an ex-post excuse to eliminate softball from the Olympics.
Are there circumstances under which in theory it would be fair to cut an Olympic sport due to lack parity? Sure, if that lack of parity were the consequence of leaders like U.S. and Canada in women's ice hockey deliberately preventing development abroad, such as by imposing quotas on foreign players or by preventing coaches from working abroad. But as the article mentions, this has hardly been the case, because U.S. colleges have been pouring scholarship money into European players for well over a decade now. Sweden's 2006 Olympic silver medal team that beat the United States was led by past and future stars in U.S. college hockey, Maria Rooth and Kim Martin.
Moreover, if anyone thinks international women's ice hockey has had unprecedented growing pains, please look up the dominance of Canada in the first several of decades of men's ice hockey. It was worse. Canada's only real competition during that era came from a team of Canadian natives masquerading as Team GB. There's a blatant gender bias in the IOC's threats to the women's game. These threats were never delivered to the men's game at this stage of development. Again, failing to mention this double standard when writing about this subject makes one complicit in the hypocrisy.
