Let’s hope no one uses the Games to defect from the US to a freer society | Marina Hyde


Mike Pence’s very presence in Pyeongchang is having a debilitating effect on everyone and everything enduring his contact

It is, perhaps, a question as old as athletic competition itself: who is sport’s worst spectator? Of all the absolute arses, watching all the sports in all the world, who is the most unspeakably irksome, the most antithetical to everything you thought you knew about the power and possibilities of physical contest? Whose name is Death, Destroyer of Sports? Who is Earth’s foremost sporticidal maniac?

I could have sworn I sat next to him at Stamford Bridge once. Yet a friend insists the entity takes female form, and attends the same junior netball games as her every week, destroying not just her own kids’ confidence, but the hope and spirit of everyone condemned to share a postcode with her. Others maintain it is a creature who has stalked history, never actually dying, but merely disappearing through a haunted turnstile, only to reapparate weeks or even centuries later at your local derby.

Related: Pence skips Olympics dinner in snub to North Korean officials

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