The Olympics Need Some Doping
By oytun • August 21st, 2008
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 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!
Tags:fix, medal allocation, olympics
oytun is loving the game.
Email this author | All posts by oytun
similar to what is done in Gymnastics? It’s quite the opposite…not only do they have a team competition (with all disciplines represented), but an ‘all-around’ competition (when individuals do all disciplines) and THEN they split it into each different event and have individual golds for each! I’m just gutted that they removed ‘rope climbing’ and ‘club swinging’ after 1936 and 1904 respectively.
fat random guy who has never done any real 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? Shooting and, let’s say, basketball are clearly very different disciplines (as you point out), but if it’s so easy for your fat friend to win a gold medal, why don’t your superheroes step in to the shooting range and do it? Because they can’t! Because it actually takes a lifetime of dedication to your sport to be able to be that accurate with a gun, to shoot under pressure and to perform at the olympics…but because these guys aren’t on ESPN every day you shouldn’t ignore their sporting achievements.
sometimes it takes decades to break a record? The only occasion it ever got near 10 years was during a little thing called the Second World War, when there weren’t that many sprints going on: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:World_record_progression_100m_men.png. Bolt’s running was amazing and his dominance in short track sprinting is obvious, but don’t forget Phelps broke seven world records himself…at three different distances, and has owned swimming for not just this Olympics but for the last four years. We’ll see where Usain Bolt finishes in London 2012…
смешных ситуаций в жизни было много - помню в детстве на даче слушал Kreator, так пришла бабушка сказала что магнитофон испортился
Hi Oli, thanks for bringing up these points, seems like I wasnt clear enough in some areas.
What I meant by ‘SIMILAR to gymnastics’ is that they should have the ‘all-around competition’ format that is present in Gymnastics - and have nothing else. This also applies to Gymnastics, Diving events, some running events, and any field where one ’sport’ gets much more medals that others. Or like I suggested later on, give a ‘weight’ system to the gold - each sport can be awarded one gold equivalent in the final rankings, and the different events share a portion of the ‘one medal pie’.
As for you’re comments on the fat guy whos good at shooting, my point here was to point out (in a rather humorous way) that one guy competing in a rather unpopular (hence less competitive sport) gets equal credit towards “whos the best sporting country in the world” race that is the Olympics as 12 of the worlds most impressive athletes do. Again, a ‘gold weight’ system seems approapriate here.
As for your efforts to downplay Bolt’s achievements, let me remind you that it had been 12 years since the 200m record was broken (by Olympic legend Michael Johnson no less), and the 100m record wasn’t just broken..it was demolished and ridiculized. If you’ve been following the latest developments in Swimming, you will know that the records there aren’t NEARLY as impressive as the swimming technology is seeing revolutionary changes allowing for much faster times (high tech swim gear, swimming pool with extra empty lanes to absorb waves, deeper pools allowing for faster speeds etc.)
In the end I appreciate your attempts to finepick errors in my thinking, but you’ve said nothing about the overall premise and purpose of my rantings: is the overall competition system perfect as it is now? Is the final medal ranking table serving its purpose as the final word on the nation’s sporting achievements. If you don’t think anything can be done to improve the overall excitment and meaning of the Olympic games, then I’d be inclined to hear your reasons why…
привет. Админ, хошь прикол ?
к тебе на сайт можна заходить через яндекс 
yandex.ru/redir?url=www.oytun.co.uk
Зря не используете FeedBurner
Админчег
У меня к тебе небольшое предложение, хоть и не по теме блога 
Напиши пожалуйста свой обзор передачи Гордон Кихот. Особенно прошлый выпуск, про Шансон.
Спасибо
Удачи дружище
С праздничком всех))) Празднуете уже?))
Спасибо, было интересно
Кто является хозяином этого блога ?!
Я прошу вас, мне нужно ваше мнение по-поводу недавнего конфликта-войны в Южной Осетии. Поверьте, каждый должен иметь свою точку зрения, напишите пожалуйста об этом.
з.ы. моё мнение, если коротко, то Грузия совершила беспрецедентный поступок….
Привет !!!
как вам вчерашний драматический матч между ЦСКА и Спартаком ? 
Очумелый Футбол !!!
http://www.oytun.co.uk, админ. Кто писал про последнее китайское предупреждение ? Извини. Я надеюсь мы найдем компромисс ? 1. Поставь на блог-комментирование хорошую каптчу. 2. Пошли урлы своих блогов сюда chezanah@gmail.com и ты избавишься от меня. Ещё раз приношу извинения. издержки производства…
Доброй Ночи. Только что по первому каналу был фильм 12. Каковы ваши ощущения ?
ну да, вполне неплохой пост :p. как думаете, завтра Арсенал победит Манчестер ?
придётся идти в бар, где есть зелёное яблочко нтв
з.ы. жаль по обычному телевидению не посмотришь…
я думаю сегодня в 15-45 по Москве канониры победят манукунианцев !
Вот так ! хотя жаль Адебайора не будет
Вперёд Арсенал !!!
пока я жив, я буду помнить ваш ресурс
заношу в букмарки….
Так зачитался, что пропустил бы Спартак - Локомотив