MikeLigalig.com

Stop Counting Olympic Medals!
Our national worth should not be measured in gold, silver, and bronze
http://www.newrepublic.com/
BY CARLO DAVIS
FEBRUARY 19, 2014

 
With the Sochi games nearing the homestretch, the focus has turned to that most irresistible of Olympic events: watching the medal count. Many publications keep a running tally, and some even investigate why big countries like the United States and Russia haven’t won more, or argue that, adjusted for population and GDP, smaller nations like Norway and Belarus are really the medal leaders. The order of the medal table may be up for debate—Drudge has made it clear he judges by gold alone—but the concept of the medal table itself has gone conspicuously unquestioned. That’s unfortunate, because our obsession with the medal count has become a symbol of everything that is wrong with the Olympics today.

As economists Kevin Grier and Tyler Cowen noted during the London Games, medals typically go to countries that are rich, populous, and invest significant sums in their Olympic training program (though focusing on specific sports—like the Netherlands do in speed skating—can give smaller nations a comparative advantage). For the U.S., the all-time leader in both Olympic golds and total medals, the games are a biennial ego boost at a time when America consistently lags behind the rest of the developed world in several more important metrics. We may not be first in income equality, health care, or math, reading and science scores, but we can still bring home the gold.

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Perhaps that’s because the games inevitably breed suspicion, envy, and even anger. In a Gallup poll taken just as the Sochi games began, Americans’s favorability rating of Russia fell to its lowest level in 15 years. Surely, Russia's hospitality toward Edward Snowden and support for the Syrian regime played into that—but just as surely, so did our Olympic competitiveness with the host nation. Then came the U.S.-Russia hockey game on Saturday, in which a Russian go-ahead goal with five minutes remaining was disallowed by the American referee. The U.S. went on to win in a shootout, and prominent Russians reacted with vitriol, even accusing NBC of buying a favorable ruling. It’s safe to say U.S.-Russia relations won’t be thawing anytime soon.

What's more, the medal count explicitly violates the IOC’s own rules. The Olympic charter explicitly states that “The IOC and the [Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games] shall not draw up any global ranking per country, instead honoring individual medal winners." After all, as the Charter makes clear, “the Olympic Games are competitions between athletes in individual or team events and not between countries.” Despite this, the official Sochi 2014 website prominently features a medal count, as did the websites for London, Vancouver, Beijing, and Turin. (By the way, is there anything sadder than an eight-year-old Olympic homepage?)

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and there we were, repeatedly in the media, ruing the day the country supposedly didn't spend for our own figure skating michael.  there's got to be a mean here, like when is enough, enough.   

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you mean to say that our legislators are better off ice skating with janet napoles?

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