Olympic champion appeals for Darfur

Kudos to new gold medalist Joey Cheek for keeping perspective and priorities in order in a lifestyle not condusive to thinking outside oneself.

Cheek used his accomplishment to pinpoint visibility to Darfur and similar travesty-ridden areas. He's donating his entire gold-medal bonus from the U.S. Olympic Committee to Right to Play, an organization dedicated to improving the lives of children in disadvantaged parts of the world, and appealled to sponsors to match it.

"In the Darfur region of Sudan, there have been tens of thousands of people killed," Cheek said. "My government has labeled it a genocide. I will be donating it specifically to a program to help refugees in Chad, where there are over 60,000 children who have been displaced from their homes," Cheek said.

He said what he does is pretty ridiculous, skating on ice in tights, but if he could use it to position himself for two seconds at the microphone for this cause, then great. I don't want to post much on the Olympics; they're just too big and out-of-touch with commonfolk reality, but this is a REAL champion IMO. I am wretched by the blind eye toward the Darfur genocide, a dire repeat of the outside world's blithe ignoring of the Jewish Holocaust during WWII, and others since and now.

And I loved his mother's quote, "It was absolutely amazing. All this time of watching him go round in circles."

Sources: NPR Morning Edition and Detroit Free Press


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