Kazakhstan’s shooting team has been left stunned after Borat spoof anthem was played during a medal ceremony at the 10th Arab Shooting Competition in Kuwait instead of the real one.
Kazakh team asked for an apology and the medal ceremony was later rerun.
The team’s coach told Kazakh media the organizers had downloaded the parody from the internet by mistake.
The song was produced by British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen for Borat movie, which shows Kazakhs as backward and bigoted.
Footage of Thursday’s original ceremony posted on YouTube shows gold medalist Maria Dmitrienko listening to the anthem without emotion and finally smiling as it ends.
Coach Anvar Yunusmetov told Kazakh news agency Tengrinews that the tournament’s organizers had also got the Serbian national anthem wrong.
“Then Maria Dmitrienko’s turn came,” Anvar Yunusmetov said.
“She got up on to the pedestal and they played a completely different anthem, offensive to Kazakhstan.”
The spoof song praises Kazakhstan for its superior potassium exports and for having the cleanest prostitutes in the region.
The film Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, released in 2006, follows Sacha Baron Cohen’s character, the journalist Borat Sagdiyev, as he travels to the US and pursues the actress Pamela Anderson.
The film outraged people in Kazakhstan and was eventually banned in the country. The government also threatened Sacha Baron Cohen with legal action.
Reports say the film is also banned in Kuwait.
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