How do countries find their Olympic athletes? How do Olympic teams work in general?

The Game Room
1

Beware: Astounding ignorance ahead.

I don’t really follow sports (of any kind). The Olympics seem like a mix of different sports categorized by season (?), like right now they’re all winter sports, including many I’ve never heard of… the guy from my town is competing in something called “freeski halfpipe” — I know what those words mean individually, but not the sport they refer to collectively…

But anyway, my real question is: For either a niche sport or even any of the bigger ones, like soccer (is that in the Olympics?), how do certain individual athletes come to represent a country? Like, with so many different sports, how does a “country” (or an Olympic association within it…?) get familiar enough with each individual sport, and all the possible athletes within it, to identify the final small team that represents the nation as a whole? Is there some state-by-state elimination tournament that comes first, one per sport? Like do you have to first win the national soccer competition before “graduating” to the Olympics?

And how do the athletes even discover and get better at these sports to begin with… like how does someone go from “oh sure, I like skiing” to thinking about becoming the national “freeski halfpipe” champion?

And what does it mean for them to be part of a national team, anyway, like “Team USA”… are they run by a federal government agency and funded by tax money?

I don’t really know anything about the Olympic teams, like whether they’re privately owned sports clubs like our football teams, some sort of governmental group, a nonprofit, some sort of subsidiary or federation of the international Olympics brand (is that itself a private company, like the UFC?)… how does it all work?

2

For skiing, for example, I found this:

U.S. Ski & Snowboard, formerly known as the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association,[1][2] is the national governing body for Olympic and Paralympic skiing and snowboarding.

Interested young boys and girls generally begin competing through one of U.S. Ski & Snowboard’s 400 local clubs

Clubs provide introductory education and training, as well as competition programs

One of the U.S. Ski & Snowboard’s roles is providing education to ski and snowboard coaches who work with young athletes

Competition programs are held within each region or division leading up to national and international events. From these competitions, athletes earn points and are ranked nationally with the highest ranking athletes earning nominations to join the U.S. national teams, which compete at the World Cup level.

ISTM, at least for skiing, though I’m guessing most other sports are somewhat similar, you join a club that’s run by a group affiliated with the Olympics and work your way to the top via training and internal competitions.

ETA, here’s the website for US Ski and Snowboard and here’s the site for a local club that someone would join as part of their path to the Olympics.

If you poke around a bit, they both have pipelines dedicated to training people to become Olympic athletes. And, like I said, I’m guessing other sports are pretty similar. Join a local club affiliated with the Olympics and work your way to the top.

3

There was a Planet Money episode recently addressing some of background around funding for U.S. Olympic sports.

How college sports juiced Olympic development (link to transcript)

4

2 of my nieces play underwater hockey. If you want a niche sport, you’d have to work to get nichier. They have competed on several national teams in world competitions.

Basically, several colleges/cities/regions have clubs, those clubs seek opportunities to compete against others, they form a governing organization that cooperates with other countries’ governing organizations and they decide upon a format for world competitions. Just a bunch of folk who enjoy swimming and this particular form of competition. I assume it is similar for luge, curling, biathlon….

For individual sports, say you like target shooting. You go to a range and see that someone posts a notice about a local competition. The folk who do well at local competitions look for lager competitions. My granddaughters do figure skating. And Irish dancing. Tho they haven’t participated yet, there are competitions in both…

My wife and kids used to be quite active in speedskating. There is a significant issue WRT the extent that the organizations NEED the support of large numbers of recreational skaters, yet direct the hugest portion of their resources towards the most elite. The elite skaters are subsidized to train at certain facilities. Much like a college scholarship. Low income, but access to the highest level of training, facilities…. Unfortunately, confers essentially no life skills when one ages out. Plenty of ex-Olympians driving truck.

5

I can offer a couple of examples at extreme ends of the sporting spectrum.

Football in England (soccer to you Americans :wink:) is our number 1 sport.
You can see kids playing in their gardens or the park.
There are local clubs for these kids to join (and the professional clubs can send scouts to spot promising youngsters.)
Schools and Universities will have teams - but the vast majority of professional players have joined a club in their teens and spent most of their time playing the game (rather than focusing on the academic side.)

There are 92 professional clubs in the top 4 divisions of soccer (the top division is the Premier League):

Premier League - Wikipedia
English Football League - Wikipedia

The English National team (who play in the World Cup) are chosen from these 92 clubs (but mainly from the Premier League.)

By contrast, we have no facilities for ski-jumping (in the Winter Olympics.)
One man decided to have a go - and took part in the Winter Olympics. :face_with_monocle:

Eddie the Eagle - Wikipedia

6

Plenty of CURRENT Olympians have regular jobs. Cory Thiesse (silver in Curling) works in a lab that tests water quality – better paying than Fast Food, but probably not a huge salary.

Brian

7

Many years ago, i was watching Olympic coverage that only showed the winners, the Americans, and the people who fell. Some guy got up for his third ski jump. He wasn’t American. He was not from a country with a lot of recreational ski jumping, and his first two jumps had been rated low. This was in the days of broadcast tv, and there was no easy way to skip ahead, so I watched a horrible fall, knowing that’s what it would be from when he first got to the start. :pleading_face:

There’s clearly some mechanism for random people in niche sports to compete for their country. I thought that’s what this thread would be about.

8

See my post above about Eddie the Eagle!

9

I responded to your post, i think. But the Wikipedia article is pretty vague about how he got into competitive ski jumping.

10

And the fact that his appearance initiated a change to reduce the number of sub-standard athletes of his type.

In general, each sport in the Olympics has a worldwide governing body, like FIS. That body is in charge of recognizing and organizing the national bodies (US Ski and Snowboard) and setting the standards for qualifying for the Olympics. In most skiing sports, athletes need a set number of FIS points to qualify for the Olympics, and countries have a quota of how many athletes they can send in each sport.

For other sports there are different qualifying standards set by the worldwide organizing bodies, and country quotas, with some exceptions for expanding the sport in under represented countries.

11

I suspect it varies in terms of both sport and individual. I suspect speedskating - while nowhere near the level of major American or International professional sports, is still significantly more well funded than (my unfounded WAG) curling, biathlon, or luge.

I recall being (stupidly) surprised when my nieces who live in Alaska commented matter-of-factly about their HS cross country skiing teams. Well, duh! High schools may not have shooting teams, but I’d wager that schools in Park City Utah have various skiing teams.

Are there ANY events in which training can be done more on a “part-time” basis than others? Or does it require a truly exceptional individual to be able to work a full time job AND train to compete at the highest level outside of their work? How many hours a day does one need to train to excell at various events? Or is the main factor a need for a flexible work schedule?

12

In general, athletes come to the United States to train and then go back to their country and become Olympians.

13

My wife used to work for Home Depot in the 1990s. They are HQed in Atlanta just of the 1996 Summer games. So this may have been a unique confluence of circumstances. Home Depot had a bunch of olympians on their payroll. I mean like hundreds of aspiring ones and dozens that either made the team or were in trials at least.

Technically they had “regular” jobs. In practice they were full time athletes. So they had a modest stable income and health care coverage at least. They still had to raise copious amounts of other money to support their access to training facilities, coaches, nutritionists, etc. Though all of that was less intense 30 years ago than it is now.

14

Initially it was up to the country to pick their athletes. If a country wanted to pick a total amateur to be their ski jumper, it was totally up to them. That led to lots of issues with non-competitive people being in the Olympics. To counter that, the Olympics set standards that the athletes had to have a certain number of world ranking points to be eligible for the Olympics. If the athlete isn’t able to gain enough points in qualifying competitions, they won’t be allowed to compete at the Olympics.

15

When you say, “the country”, who is that? And how does a wanna-be olympian contact them?

I guess every Olympic sport has ranked world events now?

16

Every country that has Olympic eligibility will have an Olympic committee that decides who gets to go. If it’s a country which already hosts competitions in a certain event, they will have qualifying tournaments to select the Olympic athletes. So for something like ski jumping in Norway, there will be an Olympic qualifying competition in Norway to determine the Olympic ski jumpers for the Norwegian team. To be eligible for the Olympic qualifying event, the athletes will have had to first achieve certain results in lower-level sanctioned events. Generally, the winners of the Olympic qualifying tournament will be the athletes on the team, but the country’s Olympic committee ultimately decides who is on the team. For a country which doesn’t have athletic events in a certain sport, then the athlete would need to contact the country’s Olympic committee and request to be on the team. For instance, a citizen of Panama might live in Norway and and be a world-ranked ski jumper. Since Panama doesn’t have ski jumping events to determine the Panamanian ski jumping team, the athlete could directly contact the Panamanian Olympic committee and request to represent Panama in the Winter Olympics.

17

Well, for the UK it would be these guys:

Olympic association

I actually used to work with a former British Olympic skiier- she was a chef at the time, and did ask her about how she got into it.

She competed not long after Eddie the Eagle (and knew him and didn’t like him much, said he was remarkably arrogant for a guy famous for not being able to ski very well), so the rules have changed- she also mentioned the team spending all their practice time helping teach a terrified guy who’d only ever been on skis a few times how to jump without dying, as he’d just been sent to compete by his home nation because they wanted to enter every event.

Her parents used to run a ski resort in France, which is why she got in to it. I remember her saying that the UK selection rules at that time at least basically favoured those who could make it to lots of competitions over skill or everything else. As her parents were willing to take her to any and all contests, as obviously it was good advertising for them, so she got enough points to qualify, even though she didn’t actually win all that much. From what she said, the qualifying events where you could get points were all over Europe, though she competed for GB.

In some cases- like luge- there’s limited facilities in most countries, so only a tiny number of competitors. In those cases I guess they’re just picking from whoever can meet the official standards by their own rules as there’s not going to be lots of competitions.

18

And his Equatoguinean equivalent, Eric the Eel:

Before coming to the Olympics, Moussambani had never seen a 50-metre-long (160 ft) Olympic-size swimming pool. He took up swimming eight months before the Olympics and had practiced in a lake, and later a 12-metre-long (39 ft) swimming pool in a hotel in Malabo,[7] that he was given access to only between 5 and 6 am.

19

In the United States, athlete selection starts at the ground level. The USOC is the umbrella organization for all Olympic sports. Each sport has a National Governing Body (NGB). How those NGBs are chosen and managed is up to them, but it’s not like a group of people decide, “Hey, between the five of us, we know a lot about (our sport), let’s become the NGB for it!” IOW, the USOC has a vetting process. Each NGB is responsible for selecting participants of their sport for the Olympics, and they have a lot of latitude in setting up their criteria, but those criteria need to dovetail with the rules, requirements, qualifications, and limitations of that sport’s INTERNATIONAL body.

Sports competitions usually start with kids, typically recreationally. As the kids get better, though, ambitious adults/coaches identify the kids that are good and funnel them into higher levels of the sport. Pretty soon, the best kids are competing regionally, then nationally, and if they’re really good, on the international stage.

The USOC runs two Olympic Training Centers, one in Colorado Springs and one in Lake Placid. Most NGBs have training camps throughout the year at one or the other facility, bringing together top athletes and promising young athletes. That allows the NGBs to keep track of their people’s progress and make sure they’re optimizing their training and understanding of things like rules changes, banned substances, etc.

For some sports, the selection process is quite long, sometimes over a year. Other sports it can be down to a single qualifying competition.

The United States is different than most of the very successful countries in that there is very little (no?) government support for the athletes. There are rewards for winning, but most athletes need to figure out how to put food on the table for themselves (some with substantial help from their NGB or private companies, as Home Depot does.)

20

Yeah, it’s dependent on the sport whether they’re coming up through club teams or the high school/collegiate sports structure. In general though, if there’s a collegiate level of that sport, that’s the highest non-professional level of that sport in the US. If there’s not a collegiate level of that sport, then club teams fill that niche. Sports like rhythmic gymnastics, archery, boxing, karate, cycling, and most of the Winter Olympic sports with the exception of hockey and downhill skiing are non-NCAA sports and draw their competitors from clubs.

Women’s gymnastics are kind of weird in that the Olympic team draws from clubs because those women aren’t usually in college yet. Many go ON to compete in collegiate gymnastics however, and it’s kind of weird to watch NCAA gymnastics and see competitors who were on the Olympic team a few years earlier.