An Olympic Athlete With No Tragic History? That Won’t Do!

A member of the U.S. Olympic ski team was disqualified from competition today when it was learned that he did not have a sufficiently compelling human storyline to exploit on the NBC telecast of the worldwide sporting event.

Tom Klujian, the expelled skier, was not raised by a single mother, never had a career-threatening injury, and did not overcome a personal tragedy of any kind before making the Olympic ski team, U.S. Olympic officials revealed today.

“Had Tom been involved in an organ donation, as either a donor or a recipient, that would have been acceptable to us,” ski team spokesman Sandy Harnofsky told reporters. “However, he was not.”

According to sources close to the ski team, Mr. Klujian had concealed the fact that he comes from an intact middle-class family who never lost their home to a flood, tornado, or typhoon.

But what may have sealed Mr. Klujian’s doom, sources said, was his utter lack of a gravely ill family member to win a medal for.

“Tom did his best to hide his background from team officials,” one source said. “But when the truth came out, he was finished.”

Speaking to reporters in Salt Lake City, NBC Sports Chairman Dick Ebersol was even less charitable, terming Mr. Klujian’s actions “a reprehensible betrayal.”

“We do our best to check out all of the athletes to make sure that their backgrounds are full of compelling human drama, but we can’t catch everything,” Mr. Ebersol said. “This is a case of one really bad guy exploiting the system.”

Elsewhere, scientists discovered the earliest known ancestor of Tyrannosaurus rex at the halftime show of Super Bowl XL.

Award-winning humorist, television personality and film actor Andy Borowitz is author of the new book “The Borowitz Report: The Big Book of Shockers.” To find out more about Andy Borowitz and read his past columns, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.