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Let The European and North American Olympics Winter Games Begin
Where the Rich and Elite Meet to Compete
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...020302280.html Where the Rich and Elite Meet to Compete By Paul Farhi Sunday, February 5, 2006; B01 Never mind the usual puffery about what this month's Winter Olympics are all about. Sure, there's the beauty of sports, the spirit of friendly competition, the dedication of great athletes and all that. But the Winter Games are about a few other things as well: elitism, exclusion and the triumph of the world's sporting haves over its have nots. What the Winter Games are not is a truly international sporting competition that brings the best of the world together to compete, as the promotional blather would have you believe. Unlike the widely attended Summer Olympics, the winter version is almost exclusively the preserve of a narrow, generally wealthy, predominantly Caucasian collection of athletes and nations. In fact, I'd suggest that the name of the Winter Games, which start Friday, be changed. They could be more accurately branded "The European and North American Expensive Sports Festival." Throughout most of the Winter Olympics' history, the parade of participating nations has been a short one. Until as recently as 1994, fewer than a third of the planet's countries took part. This year, in Turin, Italy, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) expects delegations from about 85 countries, an all-time high, but still barely 43 percent of the world's total. Even that exaggerates the extent of participation. Many of the nations in the Opening Ceremonies will be represented by tokens, some consisting entirely of sports bureaucrats, not athletes. Ethiopia, a nation of 73 million, will send its first "team" to a Winter Olympics this year -- a single skier. As always, the biggest delegations, and the big winners, will come from a familiar pool. In the history of the winter competition, dating from its inception in 1924, competitors from only six countries -- the Soviet Union/Russia, Germany (East, West and combined), Norway, the United States, Austria and Finland, in that order -- have won almost two-thirds of all the medals awarded. Only 17 countries have ever amassed more than 10 medals during the past 19 winter Olympiads. Only 38 countries have won even one medal. This had turned the Winter Olympics into a remarkably insular competition. The Czech Republic (and Czechoslovakia before it) has won more medals than China, home to about one-fifth of humanity. Norway, a nation with a population smaller than metropolitan Washington, has won three times as many winter medals as the nations of Asia, Latin and South America, Australia and Polynesia, the Middle East and the Caribbean Basin combined. By contrast, the all-time list of summer winners is long and deep, extending to athletes from 143 countries, including such places as Tonga, Paraguay and Burundi. The Summer Games have medal hogs, too, but nothing like winter ones. The top six in the summer -- the United States, the Soviet Union/Russia, Germany, France, Britain and Italy -- have swept up slightly more than half the medals since the modern games started in 1896. Obviously, the climate and terrain in, say, Indonesia or Aruba aren't highly conducive to molding superstar aerial skiers and biathlon champions. But it's not just the presence or absence of snow and ice that determines Winter Olympics success, or even participation. If it were, some of America's best ice skaters and speedskaters wouldn't live and train in Southern California or Florida. If it were, athletes from countries like Peru, Chile, Nepal, Morocco, Afghanistan and Ethiopia -- all blessed with soaring, snow-covered mountains -- would be marching en masse in the Opening Ceremonies and fighting for the medal stand. Instead, the more telling factors are economic. Would-be Winter Olympians need years of training, coaching and competition if they're going to make it to the Games. All of these things require massive sums of money. A bobsled (or bobsleigh, in official IOC-speak) costs about $35,000, to say nothing of what it costs to build an Olympic-caliber bobsled run. A pair of speedskates might be relatively cheap, but how many countries have speedskating rinks? Most nations, even those with plenty of snow and cold, simply can't afford such extravagances. Remember the Jamaican bobsled team? Those lovable underdogs endeared themselves to many with their participation in the 1988 games in Calgary (the four-man team was the subject of the 1993 Disney movie "Cool Runnings" and finished a surprisingly high 14th in 1994). Less well-known is what happened -- or didn't happen -- to the Jamaicans in the 2002 games in Salt Lake City: They didn't show up. The team ran out of funding and had to stay home. Unlike the Winter Games, the Summer Olympics level many of the advantages of national wealth, as well as favorable geography and climate. It takes all the usual things to become a Summer Olympian -- heart, outsized talent and the ability to devote most of your waking hours to your sport -- but the barriers to entry are much lower. Athletes from the poorest African and Caribbean nations have developed into some of the world's greatest athletes with shockingly minimal, or even nonexistent, facilities and equipment. In winter sports, by contrast, the rich keep getting richer. Nations wealthy enough to host a Winter Olympics tend to be those that win most of the medals (17 of the 20 Winter Olympics have been held in Western Europe, Canada or the United States). And hosting the Games tends to ensure future success; the expensive facilities left behind -- the ski jumps, skeleton runs, half-pipes, etc. -- become training grounds for the next generation of Olympians. Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympics, recognized some of these global sporting inequities more than a century ago. De Coubertin objected to the creation of a separate Winter Olympics for many years, dismissing winter sports in 1921 as "the snobbish play of the rich." It wasn't until 1924 -- some 28 years after the first modern Olympics -- that the IOC retroactively recognized something called the "International Week of Winter Sports" in Chamonix, France, as the first Winter Olympics. So why perpetuate an event that could just as easily be contested as a series of disaggregated annual championships? The reason, of course, is money and TV. And here again, it's a small world. The Winter Olympics might collapse were it not for the financial support of American broadcasters and their (mostly) American advertisers. Like the teams themselves, the audience for the Winter Olympics is predominantly North American and European, accounting for about two-thirds of all worldwide viewing during the Salt Lake City Games of 2002, according to the IOC. This is just fine by the Olympics' "worldwide" sponsors -- companies like Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Panasonic and Visa -- whose biggest markets are in these places, too. Indeed, with NBC paying about half of all the fees for TV rights the IOC collects, American sponsors and broadcasters call the tune. In 1994, facing sponsor "fatigue" from same-year Summer and Winter Olympics, the IOC decided to stagger the two seasons' Games, so that the Winter Olympics now take place two years after the summer ones. This is not to suggest that Winter Olympians aren't dedicated and superb athletes. They are, of course. But the pool of actual and potential competitors in, say, luge or curling (or skeleton or biathlon or bobsledding or freestyle moguls skiing) is ludicrously small and will probably remain so for years to come. The Winter Olympics simply aren't, and probably can't be, a truly global sporting contest. So please, in the next few weeks, spare us the hokum about the nations of the world joining together in a symbolic celebration of the human spirit. Some nations and some human spirit maybe, but unfortunately, all too precious little. |
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dude - lighten up.
its rec.skiing.nordic not politcal.social.commentary.blah |
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On 5 Feb 2006 17:40:49 -0800, "Mike" wrote:
Where the Rich and Elite Meet to Compete http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...020302280.html Where the Rich and Elite Meet to Compete It's not good to post someone else's copyrighted material in it's entirety like this -- the link and an excerpt are enough. JFT **************************** Remove "remove" to reply Visit http://www.jt10000.com **************************** |
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32 degrees wrote: dude - lighten up. its rec.skiing.nordic not politcal.social.commentary.blah And besides which, it's alot of codswallop. Don't see too many Ethiopians competing in modern pentathlon or dressage, do you? And I suppose it's the fault of us Western imperialists that there isn't enough snow in Kenya for them to field a ski team. The premise seems to be that we should reduce the world to the lowest common denominator so that every country can compete... welcome to Olympic tiddly-winks... |
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Mike wrote:
Where the Rich and Elite Meet to Compete http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...020302280.html Certain points in the above article (which needn't, and probably shouldn't, have been quoted in its entirety) are valid, but a lot of the economic arguments are equally applicable, despite the author's opinion, to the summer games. It's a fact of life that to be competitive at an international level in any sport, an athlete has to spend their life training at that sport, essentially full-time. In poorer countries, the ability of the state, or rich relatives, or whoever, to financially support that athlete and his or her family while they spend their time pursuing their sporting goals is obviously more limited. This applies equally to summer and winter sports. The point regarding infrastructure is reasonably valid, though. Poor countries are capable of producing exceptionally talented runners partially because all they really need, apart from good coaching and training regimes, is some flat ground. A combination of wealth and geography imposes limitations on many winter sports, however. Australia is not a poor nation, but if I see a bobsleigh track built in this country before I die I promise to ski down it naked on national TV... it's just _not_ going to happen, despite the fact that we could build one if we decided to. Climate, and lack of experience or interest in bobsledding, mean that it's immensely unlikely ever to become an event we would be able to compete in. Australians who do compete in such winter events (check out the Aussies in the luge/skeleton this year!!) are required to train overseas. So the barriers are not merely financial. It is probably true, however, that if 50 of the world's poorest countries were suddenly endowed with enough snow and ice to be "geographically competitive" at winter sports, many events would still fail to produce top-quality athletes because yes it _is_ ridiculously expensive to support the infrastructure and sometimes even individual equipment involved in many winter sports. But, again, the summer games has the same problem... how many poor countries compete in the sailing events? But bugger the bobsled, the ski jump, and everything else... success at cross-country skiing (and biathlon) one would hope is only limited by geography. It's one of the "purest" athletic pursuits at the winter games... basically medium to long distance running, with some skis strapped on so you can take advantage of gliding over the snow instead of plodding through it. Skis can be expensive, and the quiver of gear taken to a top-level event by a modern skiier would certainly obliterate my bank balance, but providing a few pairs of top quality skis to a handful of superb athletes is probably not beyond even some of the poorest countries in the world. The problem lies almost entirely in that they don't have anywhere to train, and while the capital cost of good gear to ski on may not be totally prohibitive, the cost of sending someone overseas to a nordically inclined country where the cost of living is _enormous_, to train for extended periods of time, is unfortunately an impenetrable wall. So I suspect that while cross-country ski racing has the potential to be the most "economically" inclusive of the sports contested at the winter olympics, the limitations imposed by climate will mean that the only people who will ever be any good at it, are those who live in, on or near good consistent snow... _and_ those that come from a rich enough country that they can travel extensively (and expensively) to find that snow on a regular and ongoing basis if they have none, or little (like us!), at home. Chris |
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32 degrees wrote:
dude - lighten up. its rec.skiing.nordic not politcal.social.commentary.blah The article author does have some points, particularly the expensive infrastructure needed for some winter sports. OTOH, breeding jumper horses isn't exactly cheap either. :-) xc skiing is definitely on the cheap end of the spectrum, except at the very top elite level. Terje -- - "almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching" |
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Chris Cole wrote:
Thanks Chris your comments are right on the button. I notice the original poster didnt add his comments on the article. We've been made aware of two Brazilian skiers both scheduled to race at Pragellato. I spotted the girl at a World Cup race earlier this year and didnt know then that she'd raced at Salt Lake City. I still dont know her name. The guy is Helio Freitas a home nation marathon runner who gave up sun and samba to train and race on snow. WE all understand the hardship, deprivations and expense it would take to become a leading marathon runner but he's gone through that a second time in an alien snow and ice environment. In Britain we lost our national interest in nordic events in the late 80's with the coming of warmer winters and the reduction in military winter training. This year at our National Champs in a neighbouring snowy country we are seeing the results of completely reorganising our admin, coaching and club targets and we now have several promising youngsters coming forward for junior development. |
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What a surprise!! Countries with winter dominate the winter games and
countries without winter don't send any (or very few) athletes. How many words does it take to state the obvious? Scott |
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Let The European and North American Olympics Winter Games Begin | Mike | Alpine Skiing | 20 | February 8th 06 04:00 PM |