Youth Athletic Games Medal Misprints Prompt ‘Quadruple Check Everything’ Advice From Overseer

By Joseph Myers

Being an absolute sports nut, I love every occasion when I pick up new knowledge pertaining to the pursuits of the world’s athletes. I definitely prefer for that wisdom to yield positive awareness, but I am now familiar with the Ontario Winter Games solely due to a manufacturing error on its medals, with the gaffe leading the event’s general manager to reiterate the need for thorough proofing.

The March 1-4 competition united roughly 3,000 youth participants in Orillia, a city located in the Canadian province’s central portion. English prevails as the de facto official language in Ontario, but, given the popularity of French in certain areas of the expanse, organizers thought it would be apt to include a rendering of the former tongue’s oath in French. A translation miscue, however, could find the powers that be needing to replace all of the hardware, with one source giving the count as approximately 1,500 medals and another deeming the total as 1,600 tokens of achievement.

Ontario Winter Games offers to replace medals after incorrect French translation https://t.co/8FeCXIqvq0 pic.twitter.com/sBZMJhz0N3

— Ottawa Citizen (@OttawaCitizen) March 16, 2018

“We missed the typo and the misprint on the proofing. It’s something we take fully responsibility for,” general manager Michael Ladouceur said of the glitches that saw the translated products, which were to bear the oath “For the glory of sport and the honour of our teams in the spirit of true sportsmanship” on them for the first time, leave out the French word for teams—équipes—and omit the “p” in “sport.”

He also told the Ottawa Citizen that even though “All the athletes walked away with a really great experience,” he and his peers are “disappointed that we weren’t able to catch this error beforehand.”

Their embarrassment aside, the head honcho and the others must implement a plan to address the flaw and will connect with all of the decorated performers to see if they mind owning an erroneous product, with the sum of the medals’ design and production having cost up to $15,000. Showing vast pride in bilingualism, Ottawa-based attorney Francois Baril commended the idea of pulling off the translation for the games, but he did not excuse Ladouceur et al for failing to show mettle in their inspections of the rewards.

“It’s not very complicated to get someone to proof these types of things,” the bar member said, critiquing the “quite sloppy” manner in which the parties went from English to French.

While Ladouceur and the others are seeking the input from the victors of the inaccurate goods, Baril feels they should offer no such choice to keep the doubly wrong items and should prove their discouragement over the mistake by recalling the prize indicators and issuing perfectly proofed replacement, price considerations be damned. A little more than two weeks after the games, Ladouceur, who revealed that a contingency plan associated with the contest could come to cover the costs for the modification, offered a lesson that will never become dated, as it rings true for every sort of product that seeks to commemorate achievements or entice end-users.

“Quadruple check everything,” Ladouceur said, characterizing the error as “a bit of a black cloud on what was a really positive event.”