Vancouver 2010: Faster, Stronger, Richer

One of my fondest childhood movie memories was when my uncle took me to see Cool Runnings.  The film was typical Disney offering, loosely based on the experiences of the first ever Jamaican National Bobsled Team as they prepared for and competed in the 1988 winter Olympics in Calgary.  I remember being moved and inspired by the final scene in which the four members of the Jamaican squad, having made it to the finals, were on world record pace until a faulty screw from their recycled bobsled caused their Olympic dreams to come crashing down, literally.  As the sled capsized and slid to a halt, I held my breath until I realized that all four men were unhurt.  Then, true to the spirit of the games, the bobsledders rose to their feet, hoisted their broken down sled up onto their shoulders, and courageously walked it across the finish line, to the applause of all those in attendance, with some of the most enthusiastic celebrations coming from their former detractors.

It wasn’t until a decade and a half later that I learned that the actual story was much less romantic than the Disney version.  In reality, the Jamaican team had not made the finals, and in their final run, they had not been on world record pace.  Then I learned that even the film’s most triumphant scene was also largely fabricated.  Although the sled did indeed crash, it was track officials who slid the bobsled to the end of the track while the team walked alongside it.

In hindsight, I shouldn’t have been surprised at all that this story of a small, poor, tropical nation succeeding at the winter Olympics was as much fantasy as reality.  After all, what are the winter Olympics besides a collection of obscure athletic competitions, whose participants are drawn disproportionately from wealthy European and North American Nations.  I would wager all of the sports in this year’s Olympics have only ever been attempted by a fraction of a percent of the world’s population.  Even the most popular sports like Hockey and Speed Skating can hardly be considered “global” in their scope.  Other sports like bobsleigh, can likely boast only a handful of competitors from each continent.

What’s worse is that more than half of the nations on the planet are precluded from ever hosting the Olympics because they lie wholly or partially within the tropical latitudes.  And no tropical country has ever won a medal at any winter Olympic competition.  This fact can be attributed partly to climate (tropical countries have a much smaller pool of winter game athletes from which to choose), and partly to the fact that all of these sports require an inordinate amount of wealth, both at the governmental and organizational level, to construct the facilities, as well as at the individual level, to purchase the costly equipment.

The idea that Olympic success is tied to a nation’s wealth is fairly intuitive in the case of the winter Olympics, but what might surprise some people is that even the summer Olympics are highly susceptible to this phenomenon.  Andrew Bernard, an economist at Dartmouth University’s Tuck School of Business has published several studies in which he accurately predicts the number of medals earned by the highest-achieving nations.  Without any knowledge of the individual athletes competing for each country, Bernard was able to predict the medal totals for the Sydney and Athens games with an accuracy of 96%.  He used an economic model that considered only four factors: population, past performance, and per capita income, with an additional factor that accounted for the boost enjoyed by the host nation.

For those who believe strongly in the “purity” of the games and subscribe to the notion that privilege due to things like race, class and nationality are checked at the entrance to the arena, the results might be a little disturbing.  Per capita income, which is inextricably linked to colonialism, was a major indicator of a country’s Olympic achievement.  This is illustrated by the fact that Sweden and Ethiopia won the same number of medals in the Athens Olympics despite the fact that Ethiopia’s population is nearly 10 times larger than Sweden’s.

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I used to joke that one of the items on my list of things to do before I die was to find a really obscure sport in the winter Olympics that 99.99% of the world’s population had never even heard of, much less played.  I’d train for six months and go represent Canada at the games, just to be able to say that I competed in the Olympics.  Looking back, it’s clear that I made a rather naïve underestimation.  I may have underestimated the stiffness of the competition.  I may even have underestimated the level of skill needed to put up a performance that met the qualifying standards of the Olympic committee.  But most of all, I underestimated the immense personal monetary investment required to undertake such a project (think of renting your own luge, as well as paying for a coach and access to an Olympic-style track).  And given that I’d never play that sport again in my life, and would probably be watched by a television audience comprised almost entirely of close friends, family members, and forlorn insomniacs, it definitely wouldn’t be worth it.