But to the BBC's long-standing critics it might strike them as an Olympic-sized freebie.
Long-standing critics such as Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, defied the government, and influential Afrikaner clerics and intellectuals withdrew their support.
Long-standing critics, while impressed, suggested this was just the kind of check and balance Brussels has needed all along.Mr Monti has listened to complaints that he is too removed from his often dictatorial case officers.
Long-standing critics of risk-modelling, such as Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of "The Black Swan", and Paul Wilmott, a mathematician turned financial educator, are now hailed as seers.
Questions remain over the way in which they responded to requests for information from people outside the conventional scientific arena, some of whom were long-standing critics of Jones.
Though they hail from the same storied era of British punk as the Clash and the Sex Pistols (and though they are long-standing critics' darlings), the Mekons never made a big splash.
"When I heard her brother say, 'what are you going to do with education?' I wanted to slap him!" When Malala became the youngest winner of the Nobel Peace Prize last week, however, much of the attention fastened on to her long-standing critics in Pakistan.
Regardless of the origins of the Turkish coup attempt, there is little doubt that the Erdogan government is using it as a pretext to rid itself of many of its long-standing critics in the media, government, military and education sectors.
"Schlingensief was here, but Bayreuth is still standing," a critic for the weekly Die Zeit wrote.
Paul is a long-standing critic of American foreign policy and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
