I’m definitely feeling old if no one remembers the state sponsored pros of the Soviet Union going up against the college students of the US. It didn’t feel like we dominated. And we certainly don’t dominate the winter games.
it was mostly just BB, hockey and a few other sports where the US sent college kids. The rest of the athletes were beyond college age.
As I write this, the medal count is – uh, spoilers, I guess? I don’t know if TV coverage has a tape delay that I’d be ruining for anyone – 16/12/14 for the USA, and 12/9/14 for China. So, yeah, we’re awesome, yay; but that’s still a pretty danged respectable showing for the folks I hear are having a century.
If you take any stock in this metric, dominate tapers off to also-ran
http://www.medalspercapita.com/
Geeze, these younger kids these days. “Always” means more than the past 10 years.
For the Summer Games, the USA has not dominated medal counts for about half of them since 1936 (where we did not lead the count, either. Nazis! I HATE Nazis!).
How quickly they forget the Soviet Union!
also for winter sports US does not have school teams except for hockey. So everyone else trains on their own which is more expensive.
Prior to the Olympics I read Olympic medal forecasting: It’s easier to predict results than you might think which predicts medal counts using a model that started with only 3 factors:
Additional refinements have been added over the years.
Well, avg MLS attendence has risen 61% since 2000 to 21,574.
World Cup ratings have both male and female are huge:
http://www.si.com/planet-futbol/2015/07/06/usa-japan-womens-world-cup-tv-ratings-record
Not only are we watching, we are growing in our fandom every year.
George Steinbrenner got involved
You know what’s a bigger surprise to me, considering how much money and resources we have at our disposal? How many events that we are simply not competitive in. Like, I watched the -75kg women’s weightlifting today, and the American competitor set a personal best with 107 kg in the snatch, en route to setting an American record, and finished in sixth.
Table tennis, too. We are completely irrelevant in that event.
Basically, just two obvious things determine how many Olympic medals each country has won over time. The first is the population of the country, since obviously you can’t win a lot of medals unless you have a lot of people. The second is the GNP per capita, since you can’t win a lot of medals unless you have the extra cash to spend on training.
There are several other small things. One is that athletics and, particularly, the Olympic games has to be a matter of national pride. The is why a number of smaller countries win medals out of proportion to their size. Some countries are more sports-oriented than others. I’ve been told that this is true of Australia and New Zealand, where people are heavily sports-oriented. It used to be true that it was a major matter of national pride in East Germany to win medals in the Olympics. Also, some countries got into sending athletes to the Olympics earlier than others, which may be why Nordic countries do so well:
communist countries used to fund people with gov. money for smaller sports like table tennis. The US has never done that kind of thing with government funding. There is private funding but not much.
It also helps that we don’t have a Ministry of Sports. Our development of athletes is decentralized, and while they represent their country, they also represent themselves. Many athletes are subsumed to their country’s desire, and some Olympic teams face punishment if they do not do well. Charming, I know.
Our athletes also win a spot on the Olympic team through merit, whereas some nations with large pools(ahem, Russia, China) handpick their athletes.
So what do you suppose that the British minister of sports does to subsume athletes’ to their country’s desire?
And when the Chinese government “handpicks” its athletes, on what basis other than merit do you suppose they make such choices? And in what way has it prevented them from winning medals?
And do you suppose that the American system, while relatively successful, might result in the loss of potential of a significant number of those with athletic talent, from lack of access to the system?
That’s not really an argument for something different, but merely to point out that your argument are largely irrelevant to what actually happens in the world.
Merely mentioning the existence of a “Ministry of Sport” says nothing without also specifying what any particular ministry of sport is doing that hinders athletic development.
Merely mentioning hand picking of athletes says nothing about how that might affect medal success if that hand picking is based on athletic skill and achievement.
Aren’t there US military personnel currently competing in the Olympics as part of the World Class Athlete Program?
Chinese athletes are literally property of the state.
An article about how some American Olympic athletes are funded:
It’s a more disorganized manner than in some countries.
This is how it used to be:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/21/sports/olympics/21athlete.html
Probably not as bad now, but I invite you to to watch replays of the 2016 Women’s Gymnastics events that recently concluded and decide for yourself whether the Chinese were entirely upfront with us when they claimed that their women’s gymnastics team were all over the mandated age of 16 years.
I’m sure the Chinese government engages in all kinds of misdeeds, but this has nothing to do with the thesis that I was responding to, which was that government involvement in athletic development harms a country’s chances of success.
I see white Americans do very well at swimming, and I see black Americans do well at track and field. You’d kind of hope so with a 300 million population and first world funding.
I also see the UK, Australia and Germany currently beating the USA on half the population.