It’s the ever ongoing clash of races, where the Westerners presume that they are one tier above us.

But are they? China’s there on top of the Olympics tally table with that many gold medals that Spain will never achieve for this Olympics.

As Sid Lowe, a Madrid-based correspondent for the site’s excellent Football Weekly podcast explains:

Spain’s Olympic basketball teams have risked upsetting their Chinese hosts by posing for a pre-Games advert making slit-eyed gestures. The advert for a courier company, which is an official sponsor of the Spanish Basketball Federation, occupied a full page in the sports daily Marca, the country’s best-selling newspaper.

The advert features two large photographs, one of the men’s basketball team, above, and one of the women’s team. Both squads pose in full Olympic kit on a basketball court decorated with a picture of a Chinese dragon. Every single player appears pulling back the skin on either side of their eyes. The advert carries the symbol of the sport’s governing body.

No one involved in the advert appears to have considered it inappropriate nor contemplated the manner in which it could be interpreted in China and elsewhere.

While Spanish basketball player like the more famous Gasol has apologised,
Gasol, who plays for the Los Angeles Lakers, told the New York Times that, at the time, some of the players had felt uncomfortable shooting the advertisement for sponsors Seur, a Spanish courier company. Seur was unavailable for comment.
“To me it was little clownish for our part to be doing that. The sponsor insisted and insisted. They pushed because they’re the people that pay the money. It was just a bad idea to do that. It was never intended to be offensive or racist against anybody,” the New York Times quoted him as saying on its website.
“If anyone feels offended by it, we totally apologize for it.”

Some do not recognise the racist remarks from the photos.
However the New York Times said Spain coach Aito Garcia Reneses, did not apologize for the picture and said the intention was a joke and not offensive.

Gasol’s team mate Jose Calderon said the gestures had not been racist.
“I want to say that we have a great respect for the Orient and their peoples. Some of my best friends in Toronto are of Chinese origin,” Calderon, who plays for Canada’s NBA Toronto Raptors team, said in a message posted on his website (www.josemauelcalderon.com).
“Whoever interprets something else from the photos has taken it completely the wrong way,” he added.

And Spain pushed the attention to medias by claiming that they are “twisting the controversy into a racist one”:
The Spanish Basketball Federation insisted that certain media had “gratuitously” tried to “damage the image not just of the federation but of the country and Spanish sport” in general.

The backlash started with 20 Minutes, which claimed England had written off Spain as a racist country by launching another attack. El Mundo said I had written a “venomous” article in which, “without proof”, I insisted the Chinese would be offended. Marca questioned the Guardian’s credibility. AS’s headline said: “The Guardian calls us racists and the Chinese laugh.” Spanish news agency copy that most media outlets have used for their stories – and therein lies part of the problem – describes the Guardian as “accusing the Spanish of being racist”.

And the controversy with the basketball team is not the end. Even the Spanish Tennis team was seemingly, racist too. This picture was uncovered by Gawker:

While they might think that it’s just for fun, i don’t really think it’s funny at all.

[quotes taken from Guardian, New York Times Blog, Gawker & Reuters]