And the media plays along -- because an engagement ring is a "bigger prize" than an Olympic medal! (That's what the AP story actually said.)
If this is a thing, Olympic athletes, please make it stop! Is this really the message we want to send to our girls and young women? That an engagement ring is a bigger deal than an Olympic medal that an athlete has worked for years for?
http://www.independent.ie/style/weddings/olympic-diver-gets-proposed-to-during-medal-ceremony-after-winning-silver-at-rio-34966876.html
Olympic diver gets proposed to during medal ceremony after winning silver at Rio
Olympic diver He Zi was stunned to tears when her boyfriend and teammate Qin Kai proposed to her during the Olympics medal ceremony.
The Chinese diver won silver for the women's three-metre springboard event and had just accepted her medal when her boyfriend rushed up to her podium and dropped to one knee with a diamond ring in one hand and a glass-encased red rose in the other.
http://www.salon.com/2016/08/15/public-marriage-proposals-are-awkward-an-olympic-medal-ceremony-among-other-events-isnt-the-time-or-the-place/
He Zi is a world class champion diver. At the 2012 Olympics, the now 25-year-old Chinese diver took a silver and a gold medal. In Rio this weekend, she again excelled, earning a silver women’s 3m springboard diving. But you probably know her as that girl who got proposed to.
On Sunday, Qin Kai, her boyfriend of six years, decided to make an honest woman out of his special and ask her to marry him. And he chose to do it right at what was actually her big moment. As the Olympics reported, he “climbed up to the stage after He Zi received her silver medal, getting down on one knee while holding a red box with the ring and a glass-encased rose.”
So I guess you can just deal with sharing the spotlight at your moment of triumphant Olympic honor, right, gold medal winner Shi Tingmao and bronze finisher Tania Canotto? I mean, there’s a man here who has something he wants to say! Let’s all accommodate him, then.
Shi Tingmao, who is He Zi’s teammate, graciously told reporters later that she’d known what was up in advance, and Canotto likewise demurred, “It’s a really great moment to ask her to marry him.” And it was a moment that lent itself easily to headlines about “taking the plunge,” and how Zi had earned a “silver in 3m, gold in love.” But it wasn’t the only romantic gesture of its kind — last week, Brazilian women’s rugby player Isadora Cerullo got a proposal from her girlfriend Marjorie Enya right after the medal ceremony in the first women’s rugby sevens final. As CNN reported, “With microphone in hand and heart-shaped balloons on standby, Enya, 28, asked Cerullo to marry her.” It was, as The Guardian ominously predicted at the time, only the first marriage proposal of the games.
SNIP
But what makes bride-to-be He Zi’s happy news a little harder to take than some garden variety Jumbotron question-popping is that is it actively pulled the focus away from what she and the other two women were actually there for — and then that became the story. The Associated Press, for example, reported on the news that “Love is in the air at the Olympic diving pool.
He Zi of China settled for silver in women’s 3-meter springboard on Sunday before accepting an even bigger prize: an engagement ring.” Didn’t know the AP was qualified to make those value judgments.