Madrid Mayor Ana Botella’s Olympic Speech
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhJt3Tzjy8I
Try typing the name of Madrid’s mayor Ana Botella in Youtube, and see what the auto-fill option suggests: ¨relaxing cup of café con leche” shows first, with “ridicule” and “Madrid 2020,” a reference to the city’s failed Olympic bid, further below.
What you find by clicking in most of the videos shown is Ms. Botella speaking in Buenos Aires to representatives of the International Olympic Committee ahead of its vote Sept. 7 to make Tokyo, rather than Madrid or Istanbul, the host city for the 2020 games.
It’s not a great performance, and is one that quickly went viral in Spain and, together with Madrid’s defeat itself, is threatening to demolish the mayor’s political career, sowing the seeds for yet another political crisis in the recession-hit country.
Like many Spanish politicians, Ms. Botella has only a rudimentary command of English, but she still went ahead and gave the language a try (unlike Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, who spoke in Spanish). The result was an uninspired, heavily accented speech including some sentences in the patois commonly known as Spanglish—the local equivalent of Chinglish or Franglish.
The live version of the performance is a tough sell. Luckily, social network aficionados are using it to experiment. There is, for example, an electronic music version that includes a doctored photo with the mayor posing in rap-style garb, and puts much emphasis on one of her key messages to the world: “Madrid is fun.”
Fun was also had by Facebook users. School of Fish, a language school in Madrid, put up and ad reminding customers that they have intensive English courses “so that the sentence ‘relaxing cup of café con leche…’ never happens again.”
Users of Whatsapp and other instant messaging systems circulated a variety of spoofs based on the sentence: a relaxing soccer cup won by a rival team in Madrid’s Bernabeu stadium, fake pictures of coffee machines offering “relaxing white coffee,” yet another doctored picture of Ms. Botella, not looking at her best, searching for a “relaxing double whisky.”
To be fair, Ms. Botella—whose English is better than that of many of her critics—has taken this all rather well. Just Thursday, she joked about the issue and praised the Spaniards’ capacity to laugh at themselves. She said that Madrid, which also had made failed bids to be the host city in 2012 and 2016, won’t be a candidate for the 2024 Olympics.
One important point is that Ms. Botella’s Olympic missteps, and the popular reactions to them, go beyond the anecdote: they compound a series of earlier miscalculations that have some political observers predicting that she may be dropped as mayoral candidate by her political party, the Conservative Popular Party, for the 2015 city elections—an important political contest that the party wants to win at all costs.
But this may be easier said than done. Ms. Botella is the wife of Spain’s former Prime Minister—and current Newscorp board member—José María Aznar. He remains the most influential figure within the party, and not one that Prime Minister Rajoy wants to pick a fight with.
Curiously, Mr. Aznar is perhaps the best English-language speaker among Spanish heads of government. He also features in one of the best-produced doctored images that circulated in social networks, coyly asking Ms. Botella over breakfast whether she’ll have any coffee today.
“Go to hell,” she responds.
by David Roman
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhJt3Tzjy8I
Try typing the name of Madrid’s mayor Ana Botella in Youtube, and see what the auto-fill option suggests: ¨relaxing cup of café con leche” shows first, with “ridicule” and “Madrid 2020,” a reference to the city’s failed Olympic bid, further below.
What you find by clicking in most of the videos shown is Ms. Botella speaking in Buenos Aires to representatives of the International Olympic Committee ahead of its vote Sept. 7 to make Tokyo, rather than Madrid or Istanbul, the host city for the 2020 games.
It’s not a great performance, and is one that quickly went viral in Spain and, together with Madrid’s defeat itself, is threatening to demolish the mayor’s political career, sowing the seeds for yet another political crisis in the recession-hit country.
Like many Spanish politicians, Ms. Botella has only a rudimentary command of English, but she still went ahead and gave the language a try (unlike Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, who spoke in Spanish). The result was an uninspired, heavily accented speech including some sentences in the patois commonly known as Spanglish—the local equivalent of Chinglish or Franglish.
The live version of the performance is a tough sell. Luckily, social network aficionados are using it to experiment. There is, for example, an electronic music version that includes a doctored photo with the mayor posing in rap-style garb, and puts much emphasis on one of her key messages to the world: “Madrid is fun.”
Fun was also had by Facebook users. School of Fish, a language school in Madrid, put up and ad reminding customers that they have intensive English courses “so that the sentence ‘relaxing cup of café con leche…’ never happens again.”
Users of Whatsapp and other instant messaging systems circulated a variety of spoofs based on the sentence: a relaxing soccer cup won by a rival team in Madrid’s Bernabeu stadium, fake pictures of coffee machines offering “relaxing white coffee,” yet another doctored picture of Ms. Botella, not looking at her best, searching for a “relaxing double whisky.”
To be fair, Ms. Botella—whose English is better than that of many of her critics—has taken this all rather well. Just Thursday, she joked about the issue and praised the Spaniards’ capacity to laugh at themselves. She said that Madrid, which also had made failed bids to be the host city in 2012 and 2016, won’t be a candidate for the 2024 Olympics.
One important point is that Ms. Botella’s Olympic missteps, and the popular reactions to them, go beyond the anecdote: they compound a series of earlier miscalculations that have some political observers predicting that she may be dropped as mayoral candidate by her political party, the Conservative Popular Party, for the 2015 city elections—an important political contest that the party wants to win at all costs.
But this may be easier said than done. Ms. Botella is the wife of Spain’s former Prime Minister—and current Newscorp board member—José María Aznar. He remains the most influential figure within the party, and not one that Prime Minister Rajoy wants to pick a fight with.
Curiously, Mr. Aznar is perhaps the best English-language speaker among Spanish heads of government. He also features in one of the best-produced doctored images that circulated in social networks, coyly asking Ms. Botella over breakfast whether she’ll have any coffee today.
“Go to hell,” she responds.
Tapescript:
Activities:
1- Try to write the speech in correct English.
2- How would you describe Madrid in order to promote the city as the next olympic games placement? If you have never been in Madrid before, describe your own city or town.
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