Andy Murray beats Roger Federer for the gold medal in tennis (just as the Williams sisters beat tow lesser-known Czech pros). The NBAers on the U.S. basketball team whomp the Nigerian team by doubling their score (winning 156-73). Pro footballers take the pitch playing on many different national teams.
Most of the other competitors who aren’t officially professionals are still full-time athletes who get “paid” through corporate sponsorships (the big Twitter row at the start of the Games was over individual athletes’ rights to tweet their own corporate patrons instead of those that had bought a share of the overall contest). Or they will be thus compensated. Within days of Gabby Douglas winning the gold medal in gymnastics, it was announced that she’d signed a deal to be featured on boxes of Corn Flakes (and was on track to ink as much $3 million/year in endorsements). Michael Phelps hasn’t had a day job other than swimming for many, many moons.
Yuck. I say we go back to an all-amateur Olympics.
It wasn’t always this way. Pierre de Coubertin founded the International Olympic Committee and is generally credited with reviving the ancient Games through his organizing and agitating in the late 1800s. Historians have debated the veracity of his beliefs but the guy felt that competition should be among amateurs who came together to test their skills at their favorite hobbies or pursuits (you can see a distinct bias toward aristocrats who possessed the time and funds to so dabble).
This ethos survived until the mid-1980s when the money behind and based upon the Games got so huge. Further, many of the Eastern-bloc countries were funding full-time athletes at state expense (and pumping them full of steroids and other chemicals starting at birth), so it was considered unfair to force true amateurs to compete with them. It has been considered OK for Olympic competitors to take money for their hard work ever since the 1988 Games.
I say the policy lessens the drama of the competition and tarnishes the brand.
The Olympics have become a professional league consisting of many different athletes and sports in which the top-tier folks all share the common traits of full-time training and getting “paid.” We see newbies step up every two years — those kids with real lives and stories about making do with nothing more than familial and community support — but they either win and join the other pros, or lose and are never heard from again. Their rare successes are certainly news but most of the coverage is about the multi-Olympic medal runs of ringers who’re returning to add to their trophy cases.
Wouldn’t it be more fun to watch truly unknown people who had their own stories of scrapping by to make good? Think of the real drama and excitement of that sort of competition. I’d much rather see some college kid try to win at tennis, or a team hit the field (like those kids who played hockey for the U.S. and won gold at Lake Placid in 1980). If somebody won gold, wouldn’t it be interesting to let them return to living normal lives and then wonder if they could earn their way back to the Games in competition with up-and-comers who were all similarly situated?
Wouldn’t the quality of the Games’ brand improve if athletes were banned from getting paid or taking sponsorship money until they retired (like we limit politicians until they’re out of office, for instance)?
How would they train? Good question, and their varied approaches would only add to the fun of watching them compete. Would it be fair to make true amateurs compete against those coddled athletes from dictatorships? No, but we’d sure root for them all the more for trying, and imagine if social media were put to some better use than commenting on which athletes are the most sexy…and instead regularly revealed how much money, resources, and other attentions were feted on the bad guys? A solid and ongoing dose of transparency would tag those state-sponsored athletes with the indelible stain of unfair prep, if not outright cheating.
There would be the challenge of forsaking all those corporate sponsorship dollars, of course. How about creating a national Olympic Fund into which brands could contribute and announce but otherwise have no say over attaching the dollars to individual athletes? How about encouraging more big businesses to initiate training support programs for full-time employees, the way UPS does? Maybe there should be a box on 1040 forms that lets us donate a buck to our nation’s Olympic team?
The Olympic Games could be so much more. They could truly stand for the ideals of citizen-competitors, and really allow for such individuals to gain an international stage and realize their dreams. Instead, the Winter Games two years from now will feature mostly the same names in skiing and hockey that we heard about two years ago.
The world doesn’t need another professional sports league, does it?
Source: http://tinyurl.com/bmy4tb3
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