I read two blogs straight after each other and I couldn’t help notice the link.
via Dwight Towers:
The only kinds of fights worth fighting are those you are going to lose, because somebody has to fight them and lose and lose and lose until someday, somebody who believes as you do wins. In order for somebody to win an important, major fight 100 years hence, a lot of other people have got to be willing – for the sheer fun and joy of it – to go right ahead and fight, knowing you’re going to lose. You mustn’t feel like a martyr. You’ve got to enjoy it.
–I.F. Stone
via LA Times:
Female Saudi Olympian loses quickly, but her courage endures
A frightened Wojdan Shaherkani’s judo match lasted less than two minutes. But as the first woman from her country to compete in the Games, she may be the heroic start of historic change.
She was still crying when they led her toward the locker room, wrapped in her brother’s arms, trying vainly to pinch the tears from her large, dark eyes. Yet the sobs of defeat settled on her cheeks in pools of victory. She had lost a heavyweight judo match in less than two minutes but may have helped alter a course of centuries.
“Hopefully this is the beginning of a new era,” she said.
The most overused word at the Olympics is “courage,” but on a historic, heart-thumping Friday morning at the ExCeL Centre, it wrapped itself as tightly around Wojdan Shaherkani as that black scarf around her head.
With some in her country calling her one of the “Prostitutes of the Olympics,” with her country’s television network refusing to broadcast the match, with her own neighbors perhaps whispering of her shame, Shaherkani became the first female athlete from Saudi Arabia to compete in an Olympic event.
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