It’s getting to the point where coverage of the Olympics is causing more issues than the Games themselves…
As you probably heard, history was made Thursday night when Simone Manuel became the first black woman to ever win a gold medal in swimming at the Olympics.
However, sports fans in San Jose might not have woken up to that news Friday morning — because local paper Mercury News completely failed to include the 20-year-old’s name in their headline!
Photo: The Hottest Athletes At The 2016 Summer Olympics!
But as if not giving sufficient credit to Simone for her iconic performance was bad enough, the newspaper did touch upon her feat… only they referred to her simply as the “African-American.”
Oh, but wait. It gets worse!
Michael Phelps just so happened to also add some more medals to his impressive trophy case the same night, so the paper decided to run the beyond offensive headline:
“Michael Phelps Shares Historic Night With African-American”
Unreal…
Naturally, Twitter was quick to call the publication out on their outrageous choice, so Merc issued an apology Friday afternoon, saying:
We apologize for an insensitive headline earlier on a story about Simone Manuel and Michael Phelps’ medal wins. https://t.co/ykWvcddaKf
— Mercury News (@mercnews) August 12, 2016
Just “insensitive”…? This apology might just be too little, too late…
Still, congrats on the win, Simone Manuel!!! (See, how hard was that?)
[Image via NBC.]
