Photo: Amnesty International
Some random thoughts as I (sort of) watch the Olympics…
1) I think we can all agree that an (unweighted) total medal count is a pretty dumb way to score overall nation-by-nation performance. Why do they even bother with this?
2) The LA Times – tongue-in-cheek – suggests that you should go with Medals Per Capita, the premise being that populous countries have a larger pool from which to pick stellar athletes. By this measure, neither the United States nor China are doing very well. Australia is currently on top. One amazing fact is that India (population 1.13 billion) has just won her first individual gold medal ever, and the first gold of any kind since the hockey team won in 1980 (which, need I mention, was a boycotted Olympics). What can I say? Those Commonwealth nations are a bunch of laggards!
3) Jim Johnson’s blog leads me to this piece by Rebecca Solnit. It’s an interesting, and heartfelt, piece. I must quibble with her premise, however. She says:
This is why it’s so peculiar that the Olympics suspend these bodies in an abstracted superstructure of nationalism, as though this feat of balance really had something to do with Austria, that burst of power really represented Japan.
Her notion that individual athletes are not molded, influenced, affected by their nationality – or rather, culture – but rather stand in some sort of raw physical isolation strikes me as naive. The idea that nationhood is an abstract construct imposed upon these would-still-be-the-same-great-athletes-no-matter-where-they-came-from gives short shrift to the organizational efforts of the Chinese athletic system, the former Soviet Big Red Machine. Or who remembers the East German system that figured out ways to beat the doping tests? And I don’t think the Kenyan athletes have a special gene for marathon-running, or the South Korean athletes have a special gene for archery. In fact, Daniel Johnson – a professor of economics at Colorado College – apparently can predict a very accurate (95-96%) correlation between medal count and a few national characteristics. According to the WSJ:
His model used five basic pieces of data for each participating nation: GDP per capita, total population, political structure (democratic, authoritarian, military or communist), climate (the number of frost days) and home-nation bias. “It’s a pretty simple model,” Mr. Johnson said.
Of course this makes perfect sense – wealthier the nation, the better her training facilities, her health care system (both in terms of treating injuries, and in allowing would-be athletes to survive childhood with body intact). It means a stable environment in which to train consistently, it means not having to worry about whether Mom is okay, it means the capacity to spend money to feed and train a large stable of potentially great athletes, etc, etc, etc. So, let’s dispense with the idea that athletes are these happy naked bundles of muscle gamboling through the mountains of Olympia – untouched by and untethered to the countries they represent, or the politics that this implies.
4) As ever, I’m frustrated by the coverage on (American) TV. Of course the coverage is heavily tilted towards American athletes. There is nothing unusual about this. Every country does it, and it’s just that there are so many quality US athletes that it blocks out coverage of foreigners. My bigger beef is NBC’s focus on just a few sports (swimming, beach volleyball, gymnastics (although tempered this year by a mediocre American team), basketball, and – no doubt – track-and-field to come) as “glamour sports” and relegate the “crap that foreigners play” to basic cable. The other creepy thing is this – I suspect, quite conscious – decision by NBC to set up a “US vs China” narrative throughout the games. This artifical narrative construct – no doubt for the purposes of making the Games more compelling – is one of those crappy ideas that only a network exectutive could come up with.
Tags: Olympics
