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http://sports.nationalpost.com/2011/12/08/joe-oconnor-canadian-skate-champs-comments-avoid-brutal-truth-about-sports-in-china/
Joe O'Connor Dec 8, 2011 – 7:14 PM ET | Last Updated: Dec 9, 2011 8:56 AM ET
Patrick Chan is under fire for suggesting to an interviewer that he might have been better off skating for China.
Patrick Chan is a good kid. Ask anyone that knows him, and knows him well in the insular world of figure skating, and they will tell you — to a person — that the reigning world champion possesses that most admirable of Canadian of qualities. They will tell you that Patrick Chan is “nice.”
But what Patrick Chan told a Reuters reporter back in September — comments that have bubbled to light on the eve of the Grand Prix Final in Quebec this weekend — is that he sometimes feels that Canadians are not nice enough back.
“Sometimes I feel we are not appreciated for how much work we put in,” Mr. Chan said after stepping off a flight from China, the country of his parents’ birth. “If my parents hadn’t emigrated from Canada and, say I had skated for China, things would have been different.”
He would go on to say that, in a perfectly rosy-hued world, he would skate for Canada — and China — a country where, in Mr. Chan’s mind, there is apparently no such thing as human rights abuses and skaters all live sugar plum fairy lives and never have to fret about competing for attention with mean old Canadian hockey players.
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