I thought he meant that some countries recruit and groom their athletes with the sole purpose of scoring metal in the Olympics, while others only offer encouragement to gifted athletes who have already chosen their path. Perhaps I was wrong.
After a disappointing set of results in Atlanta, the UK learnt from Australia how to use targeted funding to provide training and technical support to develop elite athletes into medal-winners, with the sort of results we’ve had over the last few Olympics.
But do you know which countries have been the most successful, in terms of medals for the size of population? Finland, Estonia and … the Bahamas
I thought he was saying that the government can’t do anything right so that’s why we do better than countries that have more government involvement.
PatrickLondon, did you notice that link that I gave in post #31? It gives a complete table of countries ordered by medals per capita. To be exact, the order is Finland, Sweden, Hungary, Denmark, and the Bahamas. This is followed by Norway, Bulgaria, Estonia, East Germany, and Jamaica. The article you linked to is slightly inaccurate.
He might have meant that, but it seems unlikely. It is sad that there is no means by which we could ever learn what he really meant.
So the population size is the big thing. The money is part of the cultural aspect, we are a sports nation. We spend money on sports, we spend it on the athletes, we spend it on the facilities and venues, we spend it on the athletes, we spend it on watching sports, we spend it on sports gear, we spend it on training, we spend it on coaching. Sports is a big part of our economy. Being an athlete in this country is career path, although a disappointing one for many I wouldn’t be surprised if we have more people earning a living in the sports business than anywhere else in the world. We support athletes at all socio-economic levels, and we have been since before the Modern Olympics started. The first Olympic superstar was Jim Thorpe, a poor native American who got the chance to play sports in government sponsored schools. I don’t know the numbers now but in the past many of our star Olympic athletes have come from the military. They may not have been able to dedicate themselves totally to sports the way Soviet athletes were with phony jobs, but I’ll bet they didn’t spend a lot of time painting rocks either. Sports is ingrained in our culture, add in the large and diverse population, and if ever a country was going to dominate medal counts in the Olympics it would be this one.
Yeah - the US dominates the medal count because we are big and rich. No question. There are other reasons - cultural diversity, the NCAA University system, and Title IX. .
Yet it is also still true that most Olympians must have day jobs, even in the US. Nobody is an Olympian until they beat out all of the other people who think they are Olympians.
When you grow up in a rich country it is easy to to dream, but you have to be better than all the other dreamers.to even get on the team. That is why the US dominates - it lets people dream.
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Looks like it’s a bit of a nadir for US men’s cycling, for some reason - nowhere near competitive [although the women’s team is strong]. The road race had two entrants (Brent Bookwalter and Taylor Phinney), which is a bit of a LOL for a country like the US, and I’ve yet to see a male US jersey in the velodrome full stop.
Wouldn’t expect the US to be cleaning house in the cycling as that’s never been the case AFAIK. But would have thought they should be in the mix for a few medals, competitive cycling is pretty popular in the US at grassroots level. There’s something going wrong at the elite level if they can’t even get a team together for the men’s track.
The US women’s track cycling team is strong - they broke the world record in the semi to reach the final of the team pursuit today. It’s just that the UK women’s team is much better (breaking the WR a few minutes later in their own semi, and crushing the US team in the final with yet another WR), at the Olympics anyway, notably less so at Worlds.
Western Sports ministries do not oppress their athletes or brainwash them into doing it solely for national glory, but they do introduce government into the mix in an unnecessary way.
For starters, “will they defect?” comes into play with countries like China. Also, selecting athletes is less efficient than having them earn a place on the team by competing. China wins medals because they have a billion people. We win more.
Do you have any evidence or analysis to support your claims?
I think the funding from the National Lottery, along with the fact we knew we were hosting the Olympics from mid 2005 helped as well. Also, success breeds success. As well as extra funding, successful athletes are role models for kids. There’s probably no better example than Kip Keino, who inspired generations of Kenyan middle/long distance runners.
Other countries send kids to college to study rather than to do sport.
In Europe, potentially talented footballers start playing in youth leagues as young as eight years old and never have time for university.
Yes, this sort of sponsoring of an athlete is happening in most European countries as well, UK, Germany, France, Italy, just to name a few.
The programs are slightly different and suited to each countries culture.
Those Athletes would still win their medals. :smack:
Yeah, but – look, as it is, Team Germany could win gold in Olympic basketball, and Team Sweden could win silver, and Team Belgium could win bronze. (And, granted, that’s ridiculous, but just go with it.) If they get to send a single team, then that’s it; Team Europe only brings home one medal, is all.
No, actually. The various athletic federations allow member nations a certain number of competitors. While the allowances for competitors tries to account for the spread of talent, it’s also balanced against the need to have competitors from a wide range of countries and continents. Any given country will, in most events, have a limit on the number of athletes allowed to qualify for a given event.
If the United States was not one country but six or seven or twenty, that combination of countries would win more medals than it currently does, because it could send more people. It is entirely possible that the women’s gymnastics team event could see medals going to both California and Eastern America, but right now the USA can only send one team. Americans could win all three medals in the women’s combined event, rather than just the two they did win - since only two Americans were permitted to compete. You can plan similar hypotheticals in any sport; if Canada were split into two, you would run an excellent chance of having an Olympic hockey final contested by the two new Canadas, either of which would be a terrifying adversary for any other country. The USA could send *three or four *basketball teams on the men’s side, and probably more on the women’s side, and they’d be all the best teams - hell, in some Olympics they basically did send the B/C team and won gold.
If Europe was one team, they’d start running up against those sorts of limits; highly qualified athletes would be unable to go to the Olympics at all because of such limitations, so someone with a legitimate medal shot would be bumped, instead replaced by someone from another country with far less of a chance.