I didn’t really get into watching the Olympics until 2008, the summer when Michael Phelps won eight gold medals in swimming, breaking the record for the total number of gold medals won by an athlete at a single Olympics.
My family and I stayed up every night that summer cheering for the swimmers, gymnasts, even the synchronized divers.
Of course there were the controversies. The Chinese female gymnasts looked young, considering the age requirements, and shortly after the Olympics, the infamous photo of Phelps with a bong surfaced.
The Rio de Janeiro 2016 Summer Olympics already has its fair share of controversy even though the games have yet to start. When the Olympics released its logo during a New Year’s Eve ceremony, it wasn’t long before the Brazilian media claimed plagiarism.
The new logo bore resemblance to the logo of the Telluride Foundation, a Colorado based charity.
The Telluride Foundation has not yet commented on the matter.
The Olympic logo shows blue, green, and yellow people merged in a sphere. It flows three-dimensionally through a blending of the legs.
The Telluride Foundation’s logo is two-dimensional and contains red, blue, green, and yellow people dancing in a vaguely heart-shaped circle.
Is this similarity in fact plagiarism? Fred Gelli, director of Tatil, the company hired to design the logo, doesn’t think so. He says they are similar, but it’s not plagiarism. He denies ever having seen the Telluride Foundation logo before.
I agree with him.
It isn’t plagiarism in my opinion. If you look at the two logos side by side, they are similar; however, it is also clear that the two could have very possibly come from two different sources independent of each other.
And if you look at the Telluride Foundation logo, it bears more resemblance to Henri Matisse’s painting “The Dance” than the Olympic logo.
The more I look at the two logos, the more I am sure that it is not plagiarism.
The Olympics logo is bright, fluid, and gives the effect of space. On the other hand, the Telluride Foundation logo is flat and dull.
Maybe I’m just saying this because I like the Olympic logo so much better, but there’s no way that it was plagiarized.
If it isn’t plagiarism, then why would there be this controversy? It isn’t hard to find the reason. The fact is, the Olympics is a very big deal.
A smaller organization does not have to worry as much. For example, the 2004 Brazilian Carnaval logo was an exact replica of the Telluride Foundation logo. A few colors were switched — not even changed — switched.
But we don’t hear about that, since it isn’t the Olympics. Everyone loves to take advantage of the Olympics’ limelight because it is a sure way of getting attention.
Eventually the plagiarism claims are going to calm down, and the 2016 Olympics will continue as usual. What’s the Olympics without a little controversy?