Olympics
So I was watching some of the Olympic swimming competition last night when I noticed something. Many of the competitors representing different countries train n the US. The announcer would say swimmer X from country Y trains at Stanford, or they would say Swimmer Z, from country G, trains at Texas State university. It got me thinking about how many Olympic gold medals are won by athletes that trained in the US.
The US already does a find job of dominating the Olympics by winning many medals just with athletes that represent America. I can only imagine how much more dominating our country would appear if there was more emphasis on where medal winning athletes trained.
I also can’t help but think that one of the reasons the Olympics is not that interesting is precisely because much of the training is done in the US. If you are from country X its harder to get excited about one of your athletes when his success is in large part because of training in the US. To me, saying an athlete represents your country is as much about being able to say your country produced that excellent athlete as it about saying that athlete feels an affiliation towards the country. When the Olympics allows for very liberal policy on determining national origin they end up hurting the meaning of the competition.
I wonder if this this lax policy hurts the games more than if the Olympic committee were more demanding of athlete training in the country they want to represent. If I had to guess, I would say the competition benefits more from letting athletes train in any country since it insures there are more worthy competitors leading to more exciting matches.
August 17th, 2008 at 1:15 am
On the flipside, I’m sure countries have a lot of pride that many US medalists were born in their country. Also, I noticed a lot of gymnastics coaches for the US were Chinese. Many other countries also have ethnic pride. We don’t so much because we don’t really have an ethnicity.
August 18th, 2008 at 10:21 am
I would say the olympic committee has a very conservative view on which counrtry you belong…. They simply look at your passport and citizenship papers.
Good for these foreign athletes coming over to America and often times getting a great education.
August 18th, 2008 at 10:32 am
I don’t have a problem with foreign athletes getting a good education in the states. I’m taking it more from the perspective of asking what is better for th Olympics. Rigorous standards for nation representation or more liberal standards.
August 18th, 2008 at 11:31 am
If you made it an athlete represent the country he trained with, the olympics would be much like free agency in baseball. Countries could then recruit certain athletes to train at an early age with the hopes of building a team from athletes that are not just the best in their country, but the best in the world.
I’m not sure it would be better or worse for the games, but it would be different. I don’t think the games have much nationalism left anyway (I think that was more evident during the cold war).