I was watching a women’s swimming event in the Olympics, and they mentioned that one of the racers had broken the world record in that event a couple of months ago. But she didn’t win the gold, and was very disappointed.
It seems that for most sports, an Olympic gold medal winner gets much more fame, fortune, and prestige than a world record holder. But why should that be?
A gold medal means that you won a single race on a single day. Yes, you had some tough competition, and yes, you had to do well (but not necessarily win) in preliminary heats, but still, it’s just one race. And theoretically, if everybody else got a cramp or something, you could win a gold medal with a slow time.
On the other hand, a world record means that you just swam faster than anyone, anywhere, anytime. In the entire history of your sport, nobody has ever gone as fast as you just did.
How can that not be better than a gold medal? I realize that there’s only one gold medal every four years, and possibly a world record every day, but still, it’s a frickin WORLD RECORD, not just winning one race. What am I missing?
Because athletes want to win. The point of the competition is to win; it is literally the central reason the sport exists. It’s why you participate in a competitive sport.
Furthermore, when you are dealing with elite athletes, you’re dealing with a self-selected group of people who are disproportionately competitive by nature; that’s one of the reasons they’re elite athletes. They love winning and hate losing. To win a championship at the peak of their sports is the reason they worked so hard.
Setting a record is cool but if you train and train and are highly ranked in your sport and set world records and DON’T win the ultimate championship - which for most sports is an Olympic gold medal - you will forever be someone who didn’t win it all. Leroy Burrell once held the 100m dash world record. But he never won the gold medal. Donovan Bailey never held the 100m world record (he was close but Burrell’s time was .01s faster, and had been set before) and Bailey’s name will live in Olympic lore for all time. (Bailey also won a gold medal the same year in the 4x100 relay and that performance wasn’t a record.) I absolutely, 100% guarantee you that if you told Burrell and Bailey they could switch, Burrell would take that in a heartbeat and Bailey would say “no way.”
It’s worth noting, too, that records are generally assumed that they’ll soon be broken. Burrell’s record has since been broken many times, and I am sure Burrell knew it would be. But Bailey is still the 1996 gold medal winner. That never gets “broken.” He’ll always have two gold medals.
That’s a great example of my point. Six months from now, maybe even six weeks from now, hardly anybody will remember who won the tournament (and the million-plus prize money). But that 58 will be talked about forever. People will remember Furyk shot a 58 longer than they’ll remember he won a US Open.
Well, sure, but you generally win if you set a world record.
I don’t know, the Olympics just seems quirky to me. They just had the women’s all-around gymnastics last night. The US could have won all three medals, but the third best gymnast in the world wasn’t allowed to compete, because countries are allowed at most two entrants.
Or consider somebody who wins every competition for four years, and then sprains an ankle the week before the Olympics. It takes two weeks to heal, so he’s out. Starting the week after the Olympics, he wins every event for the next four years.
If it’s golf or tennis or soccer, no big deal, the Olympics isn’t the biggest prize in those sports. If it’s track or gymnastics or swimming, then nobody cares that he beat the gold medal winner a hundred times. Makes no sense to me.
1: Gold metals are more permanent. You will always be Olympic Champion, but someone will probably break your record and then what do you have?
2: Events don’t occur in a vacuum. They are affected by equipment, temperature, facilities etc. If you set a world record, but your top competitors aren’t competing there it doesn’t mean you are better than them. It just might have been a friendly event for record setting.
You’ll be a former world record holder. And unless the medal winner repeats, he’ll be a former Olympic champion in four years. I still think the former is more impressive.
Yes, you’ll hear them called champs without the “former,” just like they still call Hillary “Secretary Clinton.” But she’s not the SecState any more, and unless they’re the current Olympic champ, then it’s not technically correct to refer to them as such.
I don’t think that’s right. There are standards for things like track surfaces, allowable wind, etc. Yes, you can argue that winning a given event doesn’t mean you’re better than someone who wasn’t there, but if you win it in world record time, it means you’re better than anyone else has ever been in that event. Anyone who wasn’t there has had their whole career to equal that time, and they haven’t.
It also depends on the event. When Calvin Smith broke the then long-standing 100m record in the early 1980s, it was a reasonably big deal. On the other hand, Kendra Harrison recently broke the women’s 100m hurdles world record, but don’t bother looking for her on the track in Rio (unless she has a microphone in her hand), as she didn’t qualify for the USA team, and nobody cares that much.
There is a difference between a job and an achievement. You don’t stop being Olympic gold medalist, because someone else becomes one too. Obama will become a former president. He isn’t a former Nobel Winner.
There are standards, but there are always going to be differences. Those differences may only results in changes in the hundreds of a second, but when we are talking world records, those matter. For example, there hasn’t been a world record in the Marathon for over 40 years. This article talks about why, and it isn’t that runners have gotten slower.
Two different things. I’m sure that when the swimmer set the world record a few months ago, they were very happy about that. This week is a new competition and the gold medal was the goal. They didn’t make that goal and were disappointed.
A few years from now, they might have a different perspective or might not. Comparing emotion right after the event to one a few months ago is close to meaningless.
This makes it sound like you think that if, say, a swimmer sets a new world record during the qualifying rounds of the 400m freestyle, that they should just cancel all the rest of the qualifying, and the semis, and the finals, and declare her the winner of the 400m freestyle, then and there.
Why is a gold medal a bigger deal than a world record? For the same reason why 73-9 doesn’t mean shit, and 116-46 means even less.
Well, some records are also a bigger deal than others. The 4 minute mile, 60 home runs, 2 hour marathon, etc. Usually because of how long it took (or will take) to break them. Pretty much all of the swimming records were set in the last 8 years. Most of the swimming records set this year will probably be broken again in the next 8.
That’s ridiculous; I’m not saying anything even close to that. I’m not even saying it’s wrong to consider a gold medal more important than a world record, although I disagree with that evaluation. I’m saying I don’t understand why world records are almost completely ignored in comparison to gold medals. I could see if it was like 55-45 in favor of the medal, but it’s more like 95-5, and I see no justification for that.
Actually, I guess I do understand it – it’s a matter of TV hype, and the fact that many sports are rarely if ever watched by the general public, except during the Olympics. I can’t remember the last time I saw a swim or track meet outside of the Olympics, and I don’t think I’m atypical in that regard.
Completely disagree. Each Olympic competition is a singular event, its results standing, in themselves, for all time. Apart from exceedingly rare after-the-fact disqualifications, nobody takes the medals away.
That’s all true, but you still don’t say Cathy Rigby is the Olympic champion in gymnastics, unless you’re talking to people who follow the sport closely enough to not be confused. You say she’s the former Olympic champ, or the 1968 Olympic champ. Heck, they do it several times a night during the coverage.
I’m pretty sure that if you set a world record in any internationally organized sport, you get some kind of certificate, and they never take that away from you, either, with the same exception you mentioned. I’m also pretty sure that many, many world class meets award medals or trophies of their own, and those aren’t taken away, either.
I’m not disputing that an Olympic gold medal has more prestige than either of the above, I’m saying it seems odd to me that it should be that way, especially when (as this year) you might have very strong athletes sitting out the competition.
No golf fan is going to take the Olympic gold medal in golf seriously, with the top four golfers in the world not competing, and US hopes borne by Bubba Watson, for chrissake. But the entire Russian track team is out of the Olympics, and that won’t stop the “USA!” chants in the slightest.
Most of the sports I follow don’t lend themselves to absolute standards like a tape or a clock, so they don’t apply. Even golf, which I follow, is played on widely different courses under widely different conditions, so you can’t say that Furyk’s recent 58 is the greatest round ever – maybe somebody shot a 65 during a rainy gale on a much tougher course, and that was the greatest round ever. Same with football, which I follow — a lot depends on who and where you are playing. Alabama playing Auburn to a 3-3 tie might be a much better performance than Alabama beating Alcorn State 80-0.
So I’m restricting this to sports where you compete against the clock or tape, on regulated courses/pools/surfaces.
But, as the marathon article illustrates, conditions in clocked events can still vary more than enough to make the difference. The greatest marathon performances ever might have never stood as world records.