...unless you provide us with some hard evidence that you're his agent (or at least his momma) and you're officially speaking for him, the only obvioussliness (sic) around would be that :
One day he was told that Team Usa was to take part in the FIBA World Championship that was gonna be held in Turkey during Aug/Sept 2010 and that he was selected to be part of the team's roster.
Then another day he was told that the team was about to leave for Turkey.
And they got onto some airplane which eventually landed at Turkey.
And then Mr. Gay soon found out about the great weather conditions present (well it had been raining for 2 days that he'd been there already, but what the heck, maybe he's the Gene Kelly type kinda guy) and spoke of
how great a city Turkey is.
Twice.
You see, what actually is obvious here is (no matter what a nice person Mr. Gay may probably overall be - no matter if he dribbled and dunked his way through college -which would be OK to have done btw- but payed a tad less attention to the other courses) :
a) This doesn't make the US education system a complete failure, I do agree.
b) He hasn't been appointed as the representative of the average US citizen, OK.
c) His words seem as if they have kinda been generally dictated to him, probably by some PR person of the delegation ("...this is what you're gonna say if asked about this and that") - yet that someone probably just missed mentioning that the city is Istanbul which would make the country to be Turkey.
d) ...all these make me wonder why is it so hard for you to understand that it's apparent that he didn't know that what he thought of to be the name of the city he was at, would actually be the name of the whole god-damn effin' country (rather than claiming that it was simply a slip of his tongue). And it simply sounds ridiculous, even if he didn't major in Eurasian geography.
e) ... all of the above reminded me btw of other people, supposedly having to be a bit more cautious about what should come out of their mouths, considering the fact that they DID bare the responsibility of representing the average US person :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7Wr9cAiR1g
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WALIARHHLII
( bonus vids :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hC73JqlF4jU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLhQHeyOrnY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XK1ekhovFeU

)