Trashy?

Brian and I are having a little disagreement about an article we read on Yahoo.

You may have seen the women's pole vault competition between the Russian diva Elena Isinbaeva and the American Jen Stuczynski. Isinbaeva slept through the whole competion because they weren't even jumping heights that could challenge her and then after she won the gold medal...after only two jumps....continued jumping alone until she could break the world record...again.

In contrast Stuczynski had to jump at 3 heights and took 3 tries to pass the last height that put her in place for the silver medal. For her efforts she got basically chewed out by her coach for not being as good as Isinbaeva.

But the story comes from some comments that the American made before the competition. She said, and I quote, "I hope we do some damage and kick some Russian butt."

Brian says that is trash talking and inappropriate for the Olympic games. He also thinks it shows the prejudice of the American media in their lack of coverage of the exchange. He sites the wide coverage of the anti-american comments by Alain Bernard in the relay and the Brazillians kicking May and Walsh off of the #1 practice court as examples of the way comments made by foreigners are splashed everywhere but not comments made by our own athletes.

On the other hand I feel like Stuczynski's comments were the equivalent of "I hope we win. We'll have to beat the Russian in order to do that." No big deal. It's not like she was saying anything negative about Isinbaeva or her skills. She was just naming her biggest competition and her desire to beat her.

What do you think?

Side Note: Any of you that know Brian know that he is the biggest trash talker in all of his fantasy leagues...even taking time out from work to craft carefully worded sarcastic comments to post to his fellow competitors. Is this a double standard? I think so.