A hastily-convened sub-committee has advised the Australian Olympic Committee against handing down the death penalty to Australians who fail to bring home gold from Olympic Games campaigns.
The sub-committee found that “living with the shame is the ‘fate worse than death’ that they deserve”.
Speaking from a bunker deep in the catacombs of Parliament House in Canberra, spokesperson Juanita Campbell – who admitted that she hasn’t played competitive sport “since getting picked last for Kanga Cricket in primary school” – said the decision wasn’t taken lightly.
“A lot of factors came into play,” Campbell said.
“We took into account the smarmy attitude of Mitchell Watt for daring to suggest a silver medal was good enough, whether a commercial television network would come to the party when it came to broadcast rights for the executions, and sounded out Alan Jones to make sure he approved of the move.”
“He did love the idea, provided he could claim it as his own if it went through.
“We even had Michael Diamond in mind to head the firing squad, kind of like a ‘golden handshake’ for his years of distinguished service,” Campbell chuckled to herself.
“But in the end, capital punishment just seemed like the easy way out – and not getting the billion dollar payday for television rights, which would have given us the war chest to develop an entire army of unbeatable super Olympians for 2016 and beyond, was the deal breaker.
“Why bother putting them out of their misery if the nation can’t even profit from it?”
Campbell, whose highlight of the Games so far has been “all the clever puns about lightning striking twice when that Bolt guy won whatever race he was in”, said that forcing Olympians who finished second or below to assimilate back into society was “the perfect example of the punishment fitting the crime”.
“We’ve tolerated failure for far too long in this country,” Campbell fumed. “Don Bradman getting out for a duck in his final innings, Cate Blanchett getting all those Oscar nominations for Best Actress but not winning – even that Gotye song that all the kids like is about a failed relationship.
“Yet they’re celebrated as national heroes, which in my eyes is a national disgrace.
“So we decided that our swimming team, our rowing team – in fact, pretty much everyone who strolled into the stadium thinking they were pretty cool in the Dunlop Volleys a week ago, with the exception of the freestyle relay ‘golden girls’, should have to go through the rest of their lives looking ordinary Australians in the eye with the knowledge that they’re a bitter disappointment to us all.
“After all, if we can’t live vicariously through their achievements, how are we supposed to have any national identity at all?”
Campbell says the sub-committee had also revised Australia’s expected final gold medal tally to four, claiming that the Boomers and Opals were “shoo-ins” against the USA in their respective basketball tournaments and “shouldn’t bother coming home if they lose”.
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