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The Olympics stand as the undisputed biggest event in sports. Part tradtition, part politics-  it is in essence a celebration of humanity on the largest of stages. This years Olympics promised to be one of the most important Olympics in history, and backed by 40 billion dollars and a intriguing host, it has most certainly lived up to the hype. However, behind all the glitz and glory, these Olympics have once again revealed one major flaw in the Games’ design – the overall competition for medals is seriously flawed.

Case in point: Swimming

 I have nothing against Swimming, it is a fine sport by all means. However, history has time and again proved that there is an over allocation of gold medals in this field. Sure Michael Phelps won 8 gold medals this year and that is truely a remarkable achievement. However, it is not as if he was the first swimmer to collect a huge amount of gold medals in one Olympics. Mark Spitz, previous record holder with 7 gold medals in one Olympics, was uncoincidentally also a swimmer. Now we can fool ourselves and think that swimmers produce some freak athletes who are worthy of the amount of gold they collect, or we can stop and see that there are way too many swimming styles which are awarded seperate gold medals. I’m not suggesting getting rid of any events, but it would be helpful to group some of them together and have one medal for all 200m swimming styles lets say and award medals to those that fair best across the board – similar to what is done in Gymnastics.

Weight of Gold

Isn’t it kind of wrong that a country can win the basketball, football, volleyball, tennis competitions and end up with less medals than a single person? I already discussed the problem of some events having too many golds allocated to them, but how about the sports that have too little gold allocated to them. Football and basketball are the two most popular and played sports in the world. They start competing at the beginning of the Olympics and continue long and hard fought out matches to the very end. The country who ends up winning gold, despite having to suit up over 10 athletes gets only rewarded with one medal in the standings. How is this fair? Did they put in any less effort? Was their field any less competitive? Was it a ‘lesser important sport’? Was there not the work of at least 10+ athletes needed? But yet, some fat random guy who has never done any real Lose Weight Exercise in his whole life can come and shoot a gun at a target for a couple of minutes and be rewarded the same amount in the final standings as a full team of the worlds most competitive athletes.

Ranking System

The first two concerns lead directly to the point I’m about to make. How well a country has performed in the end is almost universally linked to the amount of gold medals they have amassed (except the stubborn Americans who rank by total medals). The ‘winner’ of the Olympics Games if you will, is the country with the most gold, simple as that. However, as made clear in my previous 2 points, this system is not really reflective of which country is ‘best at sports’ to put it bluntly. In such a important and large competition, it is mind boggling the discrepencies that are present. However the blame here doesn’t lie solely on the Olympic Comittee, it is on the media and the rather ignorant fans watching at home. When the Oympics first started, the gold rush was never as intense. The important thing was to compete and country’s were content in improving their national standards and athletes were happy improving personal records. Skip forward to present day and you have the uninformed person at home watching some sport they have never seen for the first time and anything but a medal is deemed as failure. You have the media simplifying the concept of the whole Olympics down to a gold medal race so that the clueless person at home can attach some meaning to everything and tune in to pay for those huge broadcast costs. And in the end you have an athlete like Michael Phelps being escalated as the greatest sportsmen of all time amidst this mix of gold hunger, and media hype. A real tragedy for sports fans and anyone who is forced to compete in a field where competing for more than a single medal is simply impossible. (Usain Bolt just became the undisputed fastest man in the history of civilization in the oldest and most meaningful sport on earth by shattering two records in a field where sometimes it takes decades to break a record – and the amount of coverage and praise he got was minute when compared to Mr. Phelps. )

 O-limp-ics

There is no doubt that the nature of sports, the Olympics, and the revenues attached to them evolve over time requiring and seeing many changes. This is why we have new sports introduced, rules allowing more ‘stars’ in sports such as football and basketball, and a constant evolution and moderation of technology and medicine. The Olympics have massively evolved from the days when the Greeks would host a sports competition in their backyards. It has become commericalized, mainstreamed, and the spirit has been significantly removed. No one wants to see the greatest sporting event in the world diminished to a form of tourism promotion, or advertising extravaganza, or political forum. Make the necessary changes to the allocation of gold so that there will be a true race to show which country is the greatest sporting nation. It might take a complex and perhaps subjective formula – but surely anything is better than a single swimmer outperforming over 200 countries. The China vs USA race can only take us so far.

Perhaps radical changes might be needed, such as removing the very traditional system of only 3 medal winners and instead be replaced with a point allocation system such as F1 Racing. At the end of the day, we need to bring back some sense of competition and spirit to these games where each and every athlete of a nation can feel like he is contributing. These are the athletes’ games afterall. Reality also has it that in this era of capitalism the ‘customer’ (general public in this case), is king. Therefore the best solution to please both athletes, the spirit of the games, and the fan at home is to make the suggested changes to the overall competition. Then truely, the Olympics will live up to its slogan: Citius Altius Fortius – Faster, Higher, Stronger…Better!