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Kuwait Olympic Medal Ceremony Confuses Borat's 'Kazakhstan Anthem' With Real Anthem

Kuwait Olympic Medal Ceremony Confuses Borat's 'Kazakhstan Anthem' With Real Anthem

The team's coach told Kazakh media the organisers had downloaded the parody from the internet by mistake.

Either Kuwait's Olympics staff believes that "Kazakhstan is the greatest country in the world" and "all other countries are run by little girls," as the faux-Kazakh anthem from Sacha Baron Cohen's movie "Borat" alleges, or someone on that staff needs to get fired.

The reason? At an awards ceremony for the Olympic gold medal winning Kazakhstan shooting team in Kuwait, Cohen's fake "national anthem" was played instead of the actual national anthem of Kazakhstan. The BBC caught the offensive incident:

Kazakhstan's shooting team has been left stunned after a comedy national anthem from the film Borat was played at a medal ceremony at championships in Kuwait instead of the real one.

The team asked for an apology and the medal ceremony was later rerun.

The team's coach told Kazakh media the organisers had downloaded the parody from the internet by mistake.

The worst part? The two "anthems" don't even have the same melody, so it's not even a case of potentially confusing the "Borat" version for a poor translation. Here's the real Kazakh anthem, untranslated:

And here's Kazakh athlete Maria Dmitrienko keeping a particularly effective poker face as the closing lines of the fake "anthem" are played (Warning - obscene language):

The film "Borat" is banned in Kazakhstan, as is Sacha Baron Cohen himself, so in all likelihood, this marks the first time any members of the team had even heard of the fake "anthem" for their country. The medal ceremony has since been redone and an investigation is likely, but one still has to wonder what exactly caused this to happen.

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