[An old mail I forgot to send back in January, but it strikes me as worth mentioning]
On 04/01/07, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
Of course, there's [[Eddie the Eagle]] (to keep with the E theme) who not only didn't do anything to qualify, but made them put in the rule that you had to actually have some previous success to become an Olympian ;-)
Being so bad they had to make a rule to get rid of you sounds very notable to me.
Indeed :-)
Though now I think about it, it does show up an interesting bias in our assumptions. Today, Olympians are de-facto notable, by definition world-class athletes. But thirty-forty years ago - certainly back by the 1920s - in many respects, in some of the more obscure sports, they were "the chaps from --- who turned up". We often assert a kind of retroactive assumption that that the standards of notability inherent in something in the present were inherent in its past incarnations, and use the present "status" as a blanket acceptance criteria.
An example that springs to mind is the Victoria Cross, where we have a reasonably established assumption that winners of it are inherently notable, because of the scarcity of the award and the cultural importance attatched to it. But this is a modern thing, a product of the past century; the VC was originally (by contemporary standards) given out remarkably often - in one case in 1857, 24 in a single day. 18 of those were awarded by ballot, given to a unit and then selected from among their members - do we class those recipients as "notable" in the same way as someone who won it by more stringent standards a century later?
I don't think these small unintentional broadenings of what constitutes notability are a detrimental thing to any "notability rule" - it does, after all, mean we have a larger body of topics to draw on without bickering - but it is something we should perhaps be aware that we do.