Shooting team demands apology after song from Sacha Baron Cohen film used as gold medal winner takes podium

This article is more than 8 years old

This article is more than 8 years old

Kazakhstan's shooting team was taken by surprise when a spoof national anthem from the film Borat was used at a medal ceremony in Kuwait.

The team demanded an apology after Maria Dmitrienko was played the obscene song, which features lyrics about prostitutes and potassium exports, as she received her gold medal.

A video posted on YouTube shows Dmitrienko on the podium, her hand on her heart, looking perplexed as the song begins to play. She appears to see the funny side and is smiling by the end.

The blunder apparently occurred after the event's organisers downloaded the parody from the internet by mistake. They also got the Serbian anthem wrong.

An apology was issued and the ceremony staged again.

The spoof song was taken from Sacha Baron Cohen's 2006 film, "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan", in which Kazakhs are portrayed as inbred racists.

It includes the lines: "Kazakhstan's prostitutes cleanest in the region/Except of course Turkmenistan's."

The incident was the second in the space of a few weeks involving a slip-up over Kazakhstan's anthem at a sporting event.

Earlier this month, stunned officials opening a ski event in northern Kazakhstan were blasted with a few bars of Ricky Martin's Livin' la Vida Loca instead of the national tune.