BRENDAN O’NEILL: How an off-colour joke about women applying blusher exposed the hypocrisy of cancel culture

On Saturday evening, as Australia’s triumphant 4x100m Freestyle Relay women’s team were making their way out of the Paris Aquatics Centre, a sports commentator called Bob Ballard observed: “Well, the women [are] just finishing up. You know what women are like ... hanging around, doing their make-up.”

Ouch.

There’s no getting away from the fact that this was a gratuitously sexist remark.

Four women had just put in amazing performances to win gold and here was a 64-year-old man musing on their application of lippy and mascara, as if they were teenage girls about to hit the town.

Bloodlust

His co-presenter on the Eurosport channel, British swimming champion Lizzie Simmonds, immediately branded his remark “outrageous”.

Then his words went viral on social media and the combined might of the online woke community was unleashed on the veteran former BBC journalist.

Eurosport lost no time in bowing to the mob and sacrificing one of its own to the censorious bloodlust of the internet.

It issued a statement denouncing Ballard’s “inappropriate comment”, adding that “he has been removed from our commentary roster with immediate effect”.

Ballard was on the next plane home, despite his mea culpa and a fulsome apology posted on X (formerly Twitter). It cut no ice.

This is the world we live in now, a world where there is no room for forgiveness or for understanding that, just occasionally, men of Ballard’s generation — he was born in 1959 — will fall into an old style of small talk and banter of another era that jars with the painfully woke younger generation.

He had no intention of demeaning the swimmers. He just didn’t think before he opened his mouth.

I find this state of affairs deeply depressing and it seems that many decent people agree. A whopping 55,000 people responded to a MailOnline poll on the issue yesterday and 72 per cent believed that Ballard should not have lost his job over this.

Most of them agreed that this was a “ludicrous cancellation” over a comment that was clearly “a joke”, and Ballard’s social media feed was flooded with messages of support.

One post read: “Countless hours of commentary, trying to keep things interesting and entertaining, sometimes when not much is happening. And then removed for one misjudged comment. A chance to apologise would have seemed more proportionate. Take care Bob.”

Now, that is understanding; that is humanity.

The woke Left poses as moral and decent, and yet it dangles the guillotine of cancellation over the head of every individual who says something that they deem “offensive”.

It is in fact the defenders of the cancelled, the sympathisers with the victims of political correctness like Bob Ballard, who really give voice to the civilised virtues of forgiveness, understanding and freedom.

Just a few days in and the Paris Olympics have not only exposed the merciless nature of cancel culture — they have also highlighted its rank hypocrisy.

For if you really want to see “offensive” commentary, forget Bob Ballard’s lame joke about the Aussie swimmers and let me refer you instead to the Games’ Opening Ceremony on Friday.

There I saw a far greater degradation of womankind at that rain-soaked festival along the Seine.

The headless Marie Antoinette singing a heavy-metal song was certainly in poor taste, but most disturbing of all, was a grotesque caricature of the Last Supper.

A group of drag queens gathered around a rotund woman wearing a halo in what seemed to me — and many millions watching — a direct mockery of Leonardo da Vinci’s famous depiction of Jesus with his disciples on the night before his crucifixion and before he was betrayed by Judas.

Demeaning

The drag disciples were then ‘served’ a portly and naked blue-painted man on a platter of fruit.

So that’s OK, is it? An off-colour joke about women putting on blusher will get you hounded out of town, but turn Jesus Christ into a woman and surround Him with preening drag queens in a blasphemous orgy of Bible-mocking grossness and you will be praised.

For, of course, the woke have naturally gushed over this performance, praising the performers’ “transgressive” demeaning of women and Christianity despite the howls of outrage from those of religious belief.

An apology of sorts was issued by the opening ceremony organisers who denied it was a parody of the Last Supper.

I’m not convinced. Worse still, let us not forget this is an Olympics in which a convicted paedophile has been allowed to compete.

Steven van de Velde is a member of The Netherlands’ beach volleyball team despite having been found guilty of raping a 12-year-old British schoolgirl in 2014 when he was 19-years-old. He was sentenced to four years in jail.

Chivalry

In the warped moral universe of the woke, making an un-PC joke is deemed a greater crime than abusing a child or offending billions of decent people of religious faith around the world.

It is telling to me that Bob Ballard has behaved with the utmost graciousness despite his abrupt dismissal.

“The comments I made during the Australian freestyle relay victory ceremony on Saturday have caused some offence. It was never my intention to upset or belittle anyone and, if I did, I apologise. I am a massive advocate of women’s sport. I shall miss the Eurosport team, dearly and wish them all the best for the rest of the Olympics,” he posted on X after the row erupted.

And after observing the beginnings of a backlash against his co-presenter Lizzie Simmonds for her criticism of him, he even urged users not to “pile in on” her.

Old-fashioned chivalry, you might say, from a man whose career may have suffered terminal damage from one ill-judged joke.