At the Arab Shooting Championships in Kuwait on Thursday, Maria Dmitrienko of Kazakhstan won gold in the 75 target event, but during her medal ceremony, instead of “My Kazakhstan,” she was forced to sit through the spoof national anthem heard in the movie “Borat.”
If you haven’t seen “Borat,” it stars Sacha Baron Cohen as a farcical Kazakh TV host who makes a documentary about his experiences in America. It’s hilarious, it’s raunchy, it was extremely controversial when it was released six years ago, almost every Arab country banned it, and, obviously, Kazakhstan hated it.
Some of the lyrics of the spoof anthem? “Kazakhstan’s prostitutes are the cleanest in the region, except, of course, for Turkmenistan’s. Kazakhstan, Kazakhstan, you very nice place … come grasp the mighty penis of our leader from junction with testes to tip of its face.”
As you can imagine, while the “Borat” version played, Dmitrienko appeared uncomfortable but forced a smile at its conclusion. Foreign Ministry spokesman Ilyas Omarov called the incident a “scandal” and demanded an investigation. Organizers said they accidentally downloaded the wrong version from the Internet. The Asian Shooting Federation President Sheikh Salman al-Sabah also apologized to the Kazakh team. The ceremony was reportedly done over with the real anthem. Great success!
Thanks to Fourth-Place Medal for the video
