Olympic executives cash in on a ‘Movement’ that keeps athletes poor
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Only a select few have any leverage at all to bargain for more money (think Husain Bolt and others at his level). But these select few are already profiting big-time from the Olympics via endorsements, etc. So the last thing they want is to put the games at risk.
The rest of the athletes are there because they love the competition. And there's nothing wrong with that! It's truly a win-win that hundreds of athletes are living out their dreams by competing for a gold medal in canoeing or archery or what-have-you, and that somebody will even be watching them do it.
Stepping back a bit, there's no reason that anybody should be getting a salary simply because they are one of the very best at their chosen sport. Sports stars command large salaries to the extent that they have dedicated fans. If you compete in a fringe sport, you're not going to have many dedicated fans.
(This is why every top-tier athlete makes more from product endorsements than from their team salary.)
((This is also why NBA players earn by far the highest salaries among U.S. athletes - basketball allows for much more player/fan connection than any other major sport.))
I agree with much of your post, but it seems to me that NBA players make the highest salaries because the structure of the game and the level of competition put them in such high demand relative to supply.
NBA rosters are small, and only 5 players are on the court for each team at any time. There's also a huge drop-off in competitive performance[1] as you move down the bench from the elite players. Unlike the NFL, which has a substantial reserve of "replacement level" talent from college ball, there aren't that many folks who could play basketball at an NBA level and not be totally exposed. That's similar to baseball players, who are also among the most highly paid, even though there are more positions and rosters are bigger: There just aren't that many athletes out there who can bat above .200 against Major League-class pitching.
[1] http://www.basketball-reference.com/leagues/NBA_2016_leaders...
You see a few other places with similar fields though, like the absolute bleeding edge of traditional ballet, or some gymnastic events.
[0] https://www.ted.com/talks/david_epstein_are_athletes_really_...
She said that being too tall made the balance beam harder as you had more chance to hit your head. I think been a while so anyone can correct me.
At London 2012's Olympics she set a world record in the Team Sprint, got silver in the Match Sprint and gold in Keirin.
The irony here is that Olympic Keirin is derived from a Japanese/Korean betting sport, which is basically horse racing. But with people.
NFL salary cap is $155M across 53 players = $3M/player
NBA salary cap is $95M across 14 players = $6.7M/player. But actually it is a soft cap so the teams can spend a lot more in extreme cases.
MLB has no salary cap.
Indeed. They should be getting a salary because they provide the extremely rare talent (developed through incredible effort and dedication) that makes the multi-billion dollar business that is the Olympics possible to begin with.
The reason they do not get it is very similar to what you see in other fields like science and art: because the sociopaths that run our society know very well how to take advantage of the love that talented people have for their respective fields.
The top 100 athletes in every sport could sit out the Olympics, and the TV ratings and corporate sponsorship would take only a slight dip.
Given that it is not a free market operation to being with, but rather a money extraction operation based on political pull, we could do without the supply and demand lessons.
It would be interesting to ask the tax payers if they think that executives deserve to take home all of their money while the athletes that they actually enjoy watching get none of it.
If everyone on the IOC executive worked for free without any access to their expense accounts there still would be barely anything left for each individual athlete just for competing, especially if like Team USA their local government wasn't prepared to subsidise things either. So it's really nothing to do with monopoly power either. Olympic athletes are poorly compensated because there are an awful lot of them, and most of them only get a few minutes (sometimes only a few seconds) exposure at the highest level per decade in front of audiences that enjoy watching other sports on a weekly basis
As for the athletes people enjoy watching well enough to know their name and buy their preferred hair gel, the free market means they're compensated pretty well for their brand in individual sponsorship deals. Trouble is, there aren't many Olympians that are household names, especially the ones that really need the money.
[1]sure, local taxpayers often end up underwriting an Olympics after the planners overspend on infrastructure, but that's nothing to do with what goes into the IOC president's expense account, or indeed what the athletes get
It does actually, unfortunately: https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2016/may/11/tokyo-olympic-...
Actually, I suspect that part of the justification for the IOC executives' lavish officially-sanctioned, sponsorship-funded expense accounts is to limit the ability of bidding nations to curry favour with less obviously corrupt "free hospitality" arrangements that apparently were common in the 90s. (You're less likely to feel obliged towards someone for the offer of free flights and a five star hotel for your fact finding mission if you could charge it to your Amex card anyway) Whether it actually works is another question...
Over-estimating the power of marketing is a time-honored tradition among developers and engineers. Ironically, they also tend to view marketers as clods without any real skills. Weird divergence there. But I digress.
What is the marketing message of the Olympics? That the world's best athletes are competing against each other. If that is obviously and demonstrably not true, then the marketing fails. Contrary to popular belief, customers actually are not bad at sniffing out BS in their preferred products.
Might not work. Remember the XFL? Arena football with lousy, underpaid players. Canceled after one season.
Supply and demand. The Olympics is the only place that cares about their rare talent. It's not like they can shop around for a better offer.
None of them are inherently amazing. They just work a lot.
If no-one bothered training we'd still have an Olympics, it'd just be slower.
The major difficulty with the idea of "natural talent" is that every time someone points to a skill/whatever and says, "this is natural talent" someone else finds a way to teach that skill. Here is one paper: http://talentdevelop.com/articles/ITROM.html
"Talent" is usually a catch-all for innate features distinct from trained features. ("Body shape" has both innate and trained elements.)
You said
>The major difficulty with the idea of "natural talent" is that every time someone points to a skill/whatever and says, "this is natural talent" someone else finds a way to teach that skill.
Can anyone be trained to run as fast as Bolt or would they have to be naturally talented in the first place to be trainable?
We see this same dynamic in many lines of graduate education as well, a huge oversupply of students competing over a very long period of time for a tiny number of academic and research positions, and occasionally partying through the nose for the opportunity. And like the Olympics, the biggest payouts are for the management class, whose main tasks seem to be further commercializing the whole edifice. This commercialization happens to be synonymous with expanding exploitation of those lowest on the ladder (Mo labor Mo profits) and expanding the ranks of the managing class for their business school bros from the ivies.
(Pretty similar dynamics also appear in the non profit sector, fwiw.)
The IOC retains all the mind-share of the 'Olympic Spirit,' for lack of better terms. A curling competition on NBC will draw 0 viewers (and 0 money) ((estimating)). A curling event in the Olympics draws viewers because and only because it is 'The Olympics.' Take 'The Olympics' out of every esoteric event and you'll quickly see how little viewership it'll get.
If I make over $100k for sitting on my ass all day writing software, then certainly these people deserve far more than they're getting. They shouldn't need to depend on additional endorsements/advertising money. Just by making it to the Olympics, they should get a decent amount, and those bastards at the top can afford to get a little less...shaving a few $100k here and there and distribute it.
...
Gillian: "Don't tell me they don't use money in the 23rd century."
Kirk: "Well, we don't."
* Removal of energy scarcity - dilitium is mined off planets, by robots and provides cheap limitless energy
* Replicators - Controlling the atom to the point where we can make exact duplicates. If everyone can replicate a Rembrandt, the original no longer has its insane value. There's no wait to authenticate if something is "real" or "original" Some people prefer "real" food, even realizing the difference is pretty much all in their heads. All basic things can be copied and only the very complex can't be duplicated (like Lt Commander Data's brain).
So in such a universe, an athlete gets everything a regular earth citizen gets, and visa-versa. It doesn't matter if you're in Star Fleet or choose to bus tables in a restaurant, you get the same type of living accommodation, and you can live or work anywhere thanks to transporters and limitless energy. People choose the jobs they want. Star Fleet isn't a military operation and you can resign at any time. In this world, a lot of useless jobs would go away .. Olympic committee trademark enforces for example.
The whole thing breaks down terrible in some episodes. In DS9, Sisko's dad owns a restaurant with a bus boy. Someone chooses to be that bus boy .. for no money. Maybe if the writers used a robot bus boy?
The Starfleet holodecks are just scarce because the operating code and hardware has to be formally validated and certified as safe for use in Starfleet vessels and installations. It's like how a GPS device is really cheap, until you want one permanently installed in an aircraft cockpit. Even then, malicious code (Moriarty, if I recall correctly) could break out of the holodeck sandbox and compromise connected systems.
Also, at one point, there's mention of "teleporter credits" as an explanation of why going off to academy caused homesickness -- couldn't teleport on demand. Even in the Culture, citizens had to show their capability quite a bit to design a part of an orbital. They couldn't even get their own ships on demand.
Trademark enforcement would probably be one of the things kept in a post scarcity society, if there was any system of reputation left! Being an X(TM) athlete comes with prestige so you wouldn't want someone else to be able to endow that prestige at will.
But if consistency is your thing, you could retcon the whole thing by making the busboy an in-restaurant hologram. It would be like the emergency hologram doctor, except the hologram busboy would just be an artistic feature. In the Star Trek economy, you are paid in public appreciation for your talents. The richest person in the Federation is the one who has the most fans and followers.
So without scarcity, a lot of people would give away their holographic models and software, for the prestige of "holographic restaurant busboy reaches one million downloads!" It wouldn't really be any more complicated than visiting Nexusmods to get a modded Fallout or Skyrim NPC companion with full dialogue and bonus companion quest.
If the busboy is a character that also interacts outside the restaurant, that was just the guy who scanned his own likeness and programmed a facsimile of his own personality to make the busboy hologram. His real job isn't bussing tables, it's making it look like restaurant tables are being bussed instead of serviced remotely by transporter/replicator/hologram technology.
Does that make you feel better about the guy who does menial labor in a scarcity-free economy?
Now let's say that they give 50% of that to athletes. That's 2 billion US dollars @ 500 million US dollars per year. Split between the 10,200 people, that you quoted above, gives about $200k per 4 years, or about $50k per year.
So no, cutting the salary of a handful of executives is not going to help, but that's not really the whole story.
By law, they are not required to answer that question, so we have no way of knowing. Other than not directly to the athletes.
[1]the ones you are sure will make the team barring serious injury are probably the ones most likely to have a decent sponsorship deal and not need the money so badly [2]Not sure whether the Winter Olympians factor into the article's revenue numbers or what their competitor numbers are like, but they're surely even more expensive sports to properly train for...
I'm not sure the IOC should be responsible for any potential competitors vs actual competitors. Even if it's only limited to those actually competing in the games, and only given out after competing, then that's a lump sum of $200k which they weren't getting before.
As for the stipends given out by USOC for Team USA, those are specifically for the US, and there appears to be no information on how much of that stipend originates from the IOC as compared to sponsorships obtained by from the USOC directly. Even then, most countries do not pay stipends that come even close to $20k US dollars. In many places, if the athletes got a full $200k for participating in the games, it would set them up for a very long time (if not for life).
As for the cost of sports coaches, training locales, etc, there's a whole 50% of revenue left over specifically to help pay for those costs (on top of local OC's). As noted in the article, professional US-based organizations, such as the NFL, generally share 50% of the revenue with athletes. Those organizations also have many of the same types of costs, but still are able to maintain an approximate 50/50 ratio.
More to the point, "have you even looked at the economics?". Yes. The conclusion that I have is that there is huge gulf between, (and using the USOC specifically here), USOC's claimed 90% spending and the article's "6 percent in cash payments" to athletes. So it's not clear cut that direct benefits to athlete's couldn't be raised, and substantially.
Funnily enough, a good friend of my brother's did spend 6-8 years of his life dedicating himself to getting ready for his first Olympics, going into debt in order to do so. Upon gaining a bronze medal he used the sponsorship windfall to cancel his debts and buy a house. I suspect if I suggested to him that the British Olympic team should have cut back on facilities or charged him for training and pushed him deeper into debt in order to ensure there was a moderate-sized lump sum waiting for him in the year he finally started being able to get money from commercial sources, I'd get a very weird look.
> The rest of the athletes are there because they love the competition. And there's nothing wrong with that! It's truly a win-win that hundreds of athletes are living out their dreams by competing for a gold medal in canoeing or archery or what-have-you, and that somebody will even be watching them do it.
This line of argument is what enables corporations, advertisers and governments to exploit athletes and the tax-payers of host countries to the tune of billions every year. Same as how the NCAA exploits college athletics.
> ((This is also why NBA players earn by far the highest salaries among U.S. athletes - basketball allows for much more player/fan connection than any other major sport.))
The highest salaries among U.S. athletes are earned by baseball players, and it's not even close: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_sports_contrac...
If you sort by average per year it isn't quite as clear cut as that. Excluding the first 3 outliers (2 Ferrari F1 drivers and Floyd Mayweather) the next 10 highest paid athletes per year are split roughly 50-50 baseball and basketball.
There are more baseball players on the list in total than basketball players, but I'd argue it is because there are ~750 total MBA players and only ~450 NBA players.
Mean NBA salary is ~$6M, compared to ~$4M for MLB - despite league revenue per player being roughly equal.
I think basketball stars earn so much because an individual player has a huge impact on team results (relative to hockey, baseball or football).
Usain. No leading H.
I really don't buy this argument. Why should anyone ever deserve less than his or her fair share? This might make sense if there really weren't much revenue being generated, and the executives were not lining their pockets with millions, but in this case it is simple exploitation.
The salary of the Executive Director of USA Swimming is $1-millon-plus dollars a year from an organization that pulls in about $41-million annually from donations and otherwise.
http://www.usaswimming.org/_Rainbow/Documents/37308384-90d5-...
The salary for a USA Olympic Swimmer, if they sign on to do fund raising events and make appearances for the organization is about $70,000 — About 55-swimmers are chosen for the Olympic team every four years. They are not paid that salary when they are not on the national team.
Though the athletes love the sports they do sport NGOs are making tranches of money of the backs of children and athletic teams who are force to "pay tribute" and competition fees just so they can get a chance to realize a dream that is harder to obtain than becoming an Academy Award winning actor or a CEO of a billion dollar company.
Once you started allowing pro players into the Olympics, that went out the window (although calling any Olympic athlete an "amateur" is kind of a misnomer ...).
While people didn't like seeing "amateur" US teams lose to "professional" Soviet teams, allowing pro players into the Olympics robs people of the emotional impact of things like "The Miracle on Ice".
Look at any comparable business and the talent makes a way bigger % of the money, actors in the movie industry, musicians in the music industry, professional athletes in NFL, MLB, NHL, NBA etc. These are all "jobs" that people would gladly do for low pay just like the Olympics if that was their only choice. Does that mean that the other industries are overpaying their talent? No imo. It's reasonable to expect that the people that provide the talent and a large part of the value to the industry deserve a large portion of the rewards.
Professional athletes and hollywood have strong unions to fight for fair pay(they used to be exploited for low pay), the music industry is a semimonopoly and does screw artists, but at least there is some level of competition. If you don't like one record company you can always switch labels.
The problem with the Olympics and what makes them so valuable to begin with is their rarity. They only come around once every four years. A top tier athlete may only make one Olympics in his/her lifetime and perhaps as many as ~three. Are you really going to organize and "holdout" for a whole Olympic games with your fellow athletes to maybe better the financial position for all your fellow Olympians? It's one thing to sit out a season when your expected career is 10 seasons and you may only have to sit out 1/3 of one season, it's entirely different when you may have to sit out your entire career. The athletes are being exploited because
1. IOC is a monopoly
2. Their careers are short
3. It's too risky to organize because the risk of not competing is too high. They've trained so hard to get there, to not compete is not really an option.
4. Olympics only happen once every four years.
It's a very similar situation as the NCAA except for #4. If you want to make it "not about the money" that's fine by me, make tickets to attend these events cheap or free, let any network cover the games(why does NBC get a coverage monopoly?), get rid of the endorsements and ads, make all the IOC "volunteer" administrators unpaid, but it's never going to happen. When coaches and administrators are making millions and the talent is making close to zero, the talent is clearly being exploited.
Actors or musicians have a very narrow slice at the top that makes decent money compared to that that is taken by industry machinery, and a lot of lesser "professionals" that make very little compared to the middle men. Same with athletes; the major enterprises you refer to are the top tier within their sports, with a lot of lesser venues underneath.
The Olympics is kind of weird, because it includes lots of sports that don't generate the interest of major sports, and large numbers of teams -- many from areas that aren't major media markets for the sport in question -- for all of the sports, even ones that are major in at least some corner of the globe. By doing that, it effectively is, from a marketing perspective, like a combination of the major and minor leagues together -- the ability to make money is influenced, to the extent its influenced by the athletes at all, only by a very small subset of them, and mostly by the ability of third-parties to weave narratives around the aggregate of the competitions.
You could make an "Olympics" that would support a distribution of pay more like the NFL, but you'd need to kill most of the sports, and many of the teams in most of the remaining sports, to do that. And it wouldn't look much like the Olympics.
The thing is, you could take away the president of the IOC's not-exactly-FIFA-esque expense account featured in this article and you've got just enough money to pay stipends - the meagre stipends the article complains about - for 10-12 more Olympic hopefuls. And there are 10,200 athletes competing in Rio, and for every athlete that made it, there are several more that devoted years of their time and their local federation's expense budget to trying to get there. Even if the IOC and the Olympic organizing committees had no costs at all and simply passed on all its 1.4bn per annum income on to local federations, there's really not that much to share between training and developing 50k athletes that might make the cut in facilities in 200 countries; certainly not enough to give them proper cash salaries after expenses.
Sure, some executives might be overpaid, but that's really not why most Olympians are poor or indebted until they medal or break into the media and most of them aren't rich afterwards. [It doesn't help that the article conflates the IOC with how the individual US sporting associations choose to divvy up their cash, which I'm sure is more favourable to the senior executives and less favourable to the athletes than the vast majority of national associations.] It's not the monopoly that's keeping athletes from earning an adequate living from Olympic revenue, it's that there's simply not enough money to go around, unless governments or individual sponsors decide to chip in to pay athletes on top of that. Needless to say, athletes already living on the breadline aren't going to be very enamoured with the suggestion of getting rid of the endorsements and ads so they have to pay all their training costs too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAAF_World_Championships_in_At...
like college football?
A javelin thrower isn't making much money? I'm sorry, but I have all the javelin throwers in my life that I need. Not that I would have seen him on tv anyway since it isn't gymnastics, swimming, men's basketball or a track final with an American contending for gold.
Sure this level of performance is amazing, it's just not valuable.
In the most market/libertarian sense you are right: athletes in highly visible sports do seem to make a lot more than those in not-visible sports. Market forces at work.
However, the salaries of the brass are made up off money made in television deals and other promotions. Network effects do have an impact on the size of the pie. So even the javelin matters if only for the size of the pie. It wouldn't be the Olympics with only soccer, it would be the World Cup.
I'm a big fan of an obscure sport: wrestling. I have attended events, bought t-shirts and otherwise supported US wrestlers directly or indirectly.
And yet, the Olympics is still the biggest stage for these guys because having that gold is a level of prestige that can't be earned anywhere else. It's an all or nothing gambit for the athletes, but the Olympics is the only group offering up even that much.
If people really want the javelin guy and the trampoline dude to make a living, they should attend/watch events other than the olympics.
tl;dnr -- There is virtually no value in a swimming event. There is a large value in an olympic swimming event. The athletes are the same in both. The venue brings the value.
Replace the olympics with the world championships and suddenly nobody is watching (in most of these sports). You remember how great that 2015 world championship in swimming was, right? It was all over tv, right?
People care about the olympics far more than they care about the athletes.
Yes I know men's basketball and a few others are exceptions, but they're also the ones nobody is worried about being paid.
Don't make the mistake of confusing, olympics - the event with the organizers. Swap the organizers of the Olympics with that of the World Championship and no one is going to notice any difference. Swap Usain Bolt with some other guy and the race becomes meaningless. Swap any executive with another and no one gives a shit. The Olympics are primarily about the athletes and nominally about the executive officers. Nobody gives a shit about them - I can understand officials making 50K$ the year of the Olympics but I don't understand why they need to be paid any more than that. They have organized terribly in Rio and one exec can be swapped for another and no one would care.
> Don't make the mistake of confusing, olympics - the event with the organizers. Swap the organizers of the Olympics with that of the World Championship and no one is going to notice any difference. Swap Usain Bolt with some other guy and the race becomes meaningless. Swap any executive with another and no one gives a shit.
Er, the World Championships of any sport that is also in the Olympics generally consists of the same pool of athletes, and the same bureaucrats in the sport-specific governing body. What differs is: (1) The Olympics also have Olympic bureaucrats, (2) Scheduling, (3) Name of the event ("Olympics" vs. "World Championship").
What value is that to me, exactly? I watch the Olympics and willingly tolerate the ads to see the Olympians, not to watch the IOC. The only stand-alone revenue generating value in this equation is the athletes' performances, that is the main attraction. The IOC organizes and captures that value, some of it for it's own benefit, but what value do they bring to the table?
> Sure this level of performance is amazing, it's just not valuable.
If it had no value, why do you think it is included in the Olympics at all? You seem to suggest that because you don't like javelin, then nobody should. You're confusing less popular with zero attraction, and the logical conclusion to that is the the Olympics should consist of exactly one sport and no more. But, obviously there are lots of Olympic sports, and all but one of them are less popular than something else. The fact of the matter is that every single one of them is valuable as an Olympic sport, every single one of them generates value and has sponsors and has competitors who train to be the best in that sport every single day.
I have all the basketball forwards I need, but Channing Frye isn't living on food stamps. He's not the one people come to see, but he helps keep a competitive organization running so that there's a platform for LeBron (who people do come to see). Your personal interest in a mid-range competitor doesn't determine their value, because they're helping to enable the higher-profit performers.
If the Olympic competition isn't a value generator, then the coaches and functionaries enabling the athletes are even less valuable than the athletes themselves. God knows the spectacle and ceremony part of the Olympics isn't a money-maker, that's why cities aggressively resist having it come to town.
The assumption that any of this is a function of market forces is funny to me. Sponsorships are probably the only free-market aspect of the whole program (or they would be if they weren't exclusive and determined above the athlete level) - the IOC operates as a 'charity' drawing money from national governments. As a result they're completely un-accountable to market forces, and athletes can't make any effort to collect their value. The highest-profile competition in the world is funded by donations, and they can't escape it.
Jack Warner and his ilk at FIFA weren't making a fortune because they were so efficient and talented, they were making money because principal-agent problems and regulatory capture are real. If the people raising player funding are also deciding how to spend it, they're likely to declare themselves invaluable and keep it all at the top.
But it's the other way around in GP's example. The basketball/running/whatever athletes are enabling the javelin athletes to even have a venue of this magnitude in the first place. If javelin/archery/whatever was cut from the olympic roster, would the Olympics have substantially fewer viewers?
But I'm not sure these are conflicting narratives - without LeBron less popular basketball players wouldn't get viewers, but without a base of less talented players LeBron wouldn't have a platform. Javelin's contribution to Olympic popularity is less direct than, say, a weak sprinter who races against Usain Bolt, but it's nonzero.
Bringing so many sports and athletes together is part of what helps the Olympics maintain reputation compared to other narrower events like international track races or swim meets. Phelps competed far more places than the Olympics, but that was still the contest that earned him the most attention and sponsorship.
More broadly, though: even the star performers are getting underpaid unless they get outside-the-Olympics sponsorships. IOC funds don't trickle down anywhere near as much as revenue does for other sports, so Olympians big and small are relying on external revenue to make a living.
I say the same thing about every sport, but the companies behind them all keep raking in money.
IOC gets the money because they're the ones pimping out the talent, the same as every professional group behind every sport.
Floyd Mayweather made a quarter of that by himself last year... after everyone else including his opponents, the venues, the promoters and the administrators had taken their cut.
Floyd Mayweather didn't make all this money because boxing doesn't have its share of pimps. He made it because his performance is hugely more valuable (and more effectively commercially exploited[1]) than any individual Olympic sport, including the Olympic boxing he used to participate in.
[1]not entirely the IOC's fault: I can't see pay-per-view Olympics working out profitably for Usain Bolt, never mind the participants in the sailing or archery heats
The IOC also puts on an event every two years. Boxers box a little more frequently.
I assume you're not seriously suggesting the main reason individual Olympic events don't realise anywhere close to that much revenue is more down to the quality of the promoters than the commercial appeal of the individual event.
I have seen all the executives in my life that I need.
Sure this level of organizational failure at Rio is awful and can be easily improved by firing the executives and hiring cheaper executives that can organize events better. I just don't see what value the executives bring to the table.
Satisfying demand is not the same thing as providing value.
That's the tragedy here. Not that athletes want to take money from the IOC, but that the IOC has been taken from the athletes.
I'm not sure if I had a point in this, but to try and wrap up the ramble: I think there's some interesting "lemma" in that the money is accumulating "in the middle" so to speak that someone smarter than me might make, and also that there seems to be a universal pattern for employee taking-advantage-of in situations of misaligned incentives.
An alternative explanation would be that poor governance leads to organizations spending more for qualifications that are defensible if a mistake is made.
https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...
But think of the millions you could make! Donald Trump could be the host! Make sports great again!
UFC has only recently brought in WADA, and NBA, NFL and MBA all have strong enough players unions that actually protect the athletes desire to use PEDs. There is some testing in the major US professional sporting leagues, but IMHO it is only there to constrain the guys from going buck wild with the steroids.
Most high level athletes in sports that fall under IOC umbrella are enrolled in the biological passport program and have many, many, annoying, out of competition doping controls where they take urine, blood and hair samples. Think of being woken up at 5 am for a blood test while on vacation. They have to supply there exact whereabouts for months in advance and if they can't be found they will suffer a suspension equal to a failed doping control. Vastly different than Roger Clemens or Barry Bonds.
Well, if athletes are going to cheat with steroids, I say we let Hillary host. Make sports crooked again. Imagine the amount of money that can made at the crippling expense of other people.
If you think that weightlifting leaves your joints intact ...
http://journals.lww.com/nsca-jscr/Abstract/1994/02000/Relati...
At the extreme end you get the death of the athletes.
http://www.nytimes.com/1991/05/19/us/stamina-building-drug-l...
I'd love to believe the sport was now clean.
Enjoy reading this one that involves Jim Bowie, creator of the Bowie knife.
I don't really mind performance being increased by advances in nutrition or training methods. I start to get a little turned off by drag reducing suits that let you swim faster, because the apples to apples comparisons get murkier. Once we get into doping and prosthetic limbs that outperform natural ones you just lose me entirely. If it's a competition for cyborgs, then say so.
For many events in the Olympics, I'd completely agree with you. Human variation adds a lot of drama. If every sprinter were to run on the same Footech XYZ-4 Hamstring, etc., it's hard to imagine there would be many differences between those sprinters. It'd be boring without other changes to the sport.
On the other hand, doping and augmentation could allow entirely new types of sport. Diving from 500 meters. Sprinters with pit crews like race cars. American football players with their brains removed. I might be interested to watch some of that.
So remote controlled human bodies crashing into each other?
http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/update-all-drug...
Anybody interested in any sport is already watching the world championship for that sport.
Journalists keeping track of the number of medals won by each country tells me that the Olympics is all about nationalism and has very little yo do with sports.
Not really. I dislike most events but I tune in for those that I like. All the marketing in the world isn't going to make me watch weightlifting, women's wrestling, dressage, synchronized swimming, etc. The Olympics works because its so varied. Single event tournaments don't remotely compare.
If it's 10%, then you could probably easily make an argument that they really are underpaid relative to the revenue of the organization as a whole. OTOH, if it's 90%, then you can't credibly claim they're significantly underpaid unless you can also show that the IOC and/or USOC could charge more, which you would think they would already be incentivized to do.
Being in the Olympics sound prestigious but I wouldn’t bother putting the effort for such low rewards.
Aren't athletes routinely given room, board, gear, and free coaching from their governments? Aren't many events mainly for upper-class types anyway (events with horses or expensive winter gear, for example)?
If making a living isn't a concern, prestige is a really nice job perk.
"Unlike national Olympic committees in many other countries, Blackmun noted, the USOC receives no government support to help it pay athletes."
the Olympic Training Center has some limited housing for athletes but you have to live in Colorado Springs.
I think you have a different idea about what a reward is than athletes do. Being among the best athletes in the world, and being able to just perform their favorite sport is probably the reward to them, otherwise they wouldn't have made it there anyway.
Im sure coaching / private lessons pay a lot more. Fuck the prestige, its just ego boosting with vampire scum sucker execs really winning anyhow.
That, and world class athletes are just wired differently than you or me. In addition to the obvious physical gifts, they must share some of the personality traits with politicians and executives - incredible competitiveness, large ego, etc.
Isn't the Olympics reserved for amateurs (as in unpaid) athletes only?
Are the athletes receiving any money at the Olympics?
No. Look at any of the sports that have large followings outside the Olympics: Soccer, Basketball, Golf, Tennis, etc.
In 1989 FIBA modified its rules allowing professional athletes, such as NBA players, to compete internationally.[8] FIBA agreed in April 1989 to allow professionals to play in the Olympics, despite American and Russian votes against the proposal. USA Basketball asked the NBA to supply players for its 1992 roster;
if 24 years is recent. I just realized that I'm an old man now.
I don't follow sports, my knowledge about the Olympics dates from high school, and let's just say that this was before 1992!
Most countries pay athletes a fairly large sum if they medal as well.
Amateurs, except for the tennis players, the football players, and the bicycle riders. All of which are the big name stars who get paid to compete in other dedicated tournaments. I'm sure there are others too but those are the most promoted sports.
I don't think the ones above get paid for the Olympics though.
Regarding compensation, it depends on the country, but I think many will get a bonus payment for medals or good performance. But anyway, the real money lies in advertising deals that athletes can get once they become big names (except for countries that have other types of compensation systems, e.g. North Korea).
So then there is absolutely no point in watching. Well, not until they start the doping league. (Should we debate whether the current one is?)
Even if you like the competition those seem like strong reasons not to watch.
I personally think that if you are going to allow finely engineered shoes, poles, javelins, boats, balls, bicycles, then you should allow finely engineered bodies.
Since 1988, the international federations of each sport have been allowed to set the rules for professional participation. For instance, in the largest of global sports, football (soccer), the players can be professionals, but they have to be under 23 years old, with just three over-age players allowed.
Basically athletes need to raise money by their own/crowdfunding.. Its sad news having in mind countries are being represented.
[1] http://www.kshb.com/news/family-of-olympic-athlete-raises-mo...
[2] http://www.revistaport.com/nadador-portugues-promove-crowdfu...
In major American sports leagues — such as the NFL, Major League Baseball and the NBA — management typically shares about 50 percent of the revenue with the athletes. In promotional materials, the USOC advertises that more than 90 percent of its spending goes to “areas that support U.S. Olympic and Paralympic athletes.” That same 2012 study by former athletes found that just 6 percent of USOC spending actually goes to athletes as cash payments.
Facilities, as one example, don't pop up out of thin air for free.
> The reason there’s a large disparity between what the USOC says it spends on “areas that support athletes” and what the USOC actually pays athletes, Blackmun explained, is because the USOC includes the salaries of many of its employees who work with athletes or raise money for the organization in the larger figure.
The real issue is each sport may have thousands of hopefuls and there is no way to support them all. However, if they did open the way for discrete individual branding that could go a long way to cover the most competitive athletes. As it stands you get the occasional Phelps who is set, and a lot of broke hopefuls.
Professional athletes work with sports science labs to measure every aspect of their movement and breathing, dieticians to perfect their energy intake, materials science labs for better clothing and footwear, etc to improve their performance. There's a lot more required to get to, and stay at, world class level than just running a lot.
Things like the 'shark suit' really don't advance the sport in any way which is also why it was limited in scope.
Fitness and motion analysis are not something they do every few weeks. Endurance athletes have their heart rate measured almost full time, and have lactate measurements taken between set pieces; top sprinters and swimmers have an expert look at video of their starts, turning points, etc. _every training_ so that progress can be tracked and regressions can be caught early; cyclists measure their heart rate and the force they exert on the pedals all the time.
Cameras are cheap nowadays; labor is not. The second athlete may be cheaper than the first, but that curve levels off very quickly. That's why, typically, the big sports have their own training centers, but the smaller sports share infrastructure (if your rowing section has ten persons, sharing infrastructure with canoeists probably is a win; if there are a hundred, that's no longer the case; the canoeists will want slightly different setups for their weight lifting, etc.)
PS: I have spoken to people in that outer pool from the US it's really dependent on sport and country of origin. But, in the US most people outside of the very top in popular sports have very little backing.
Paying costs those fringe athletes can't possibly manage themselves is where a lot of the federations' money that doesn't filter down to cash payments to the athletes is going.
That doesn't actually say how much the Olympians use the facilities, but if we accept that relatively few do then the money isn't going where it's intended even when it is spent on infrastructure.
Such as making sure the executives are very well compensated, which supports the athletes! wink and nod.
Given what the Olympics have become, it makes no sense. The sooner they are dropped for good, the better.
There's a significant argument to be made that the Olympics were originally setup to demonstrate who was the greatest in the activities of the day, and the activities now are no longer relevant.
I see it as a lot like "game programming"; the reason why game programming is the cesspit of our industry is that too many programmers become interested in programming because they played a lot of games and want to make them, thinking that making games is somehow more fun than other sorts of programming. Consequently whereas most people trying to hire programmers report having a hard time finding candidates, the big games companies have people busting down the doors to get in. Whereever you get gross labor oversupply like that, you're going to get the same treatment of labor.
The truth is that the athletes are replaceable cogs. Entire countries can drop out of the Olympics and the Olympics just go on anyhow. Athletes have even less leverage. Find a different dream, or pay the price. There's not much alternative; the odds of the Olympics being changed to pay athletes even a living wage are very, very long. The economics just don't favor it.
This isn't special to the Olympics; this is a general life principle. You get a set of options in life, with probability distributions over the costs & benefits... you don't have all that much power to change the choices. (Sometimes you can "make your own", in some sense, but you don't get much power to change the existing ones. Not... quite... none... but I wouldn't bet much on that.) You need to deal with that, because nobody is going to rescue if you choose a choice that involves costs you didn't really want to pay.
Sure, they are replaceable, but so are you and most everyone else on this planet. That type of attitude is why things like labor unions were created. To protect themselves from shortsighted remarks like that. Also I don't think there is a "gross labor oversupply" of Olympic level athletes in the world.
The "no one is forcing you to do anything" argument is completely tiring. You hear this for just about everything now, especially in the gaming industry, where companies are finding new ways to release half the product, for twice the price. People are allowed to complain, that's how things change. You don't just go around saying WELL THEN DON'T BUY IT. Maybe we WANT to buy it, but the circumstances are terrible, thus the complaints. But I suppose you've never complained about anything in your entire life. You just accept what you're given, because no one is forcing you to do it.
No, I lived my advice. When I was in high school, I took a sober look at my "dream job" of somehow composing music professionally, realized my talents and skills didn't put me in the requisite top .001% or so to make a decent living at, and switched to something that still brings me great satisfaction, while also letting me make a living. Everything about the subsequent 20 years has convinced me that was a great decision.
The problem with your post is that while you're collecting the emotional feel-goodz of saying something you think virtuous and enjoying the brief frisson of attacking me for saying the badthink, you're offloading the costs of that rather brief and fleeting pleasure onto the Olympic athletes and their significant privations so you can say that. I find it morally abhorrent for people to take brief pleasure in saying things and feeling morally good about it at the cost of other people having to pay the costs of living good chunks of their life in poverty. (See also advocating college while sneering at the idea that one should obtain a marketable skill from it.)
Stop idolizing the Olympics, and people will stop sacrificing their lives to it.
And think about what you're really asking people to do before spouting mindless rah-rah "Follow your dreams!" stuff. It's not consequence-free.
That's fine that you didn't even attempt to pursue your dreams, but these people ARE the top .001% who made it, and they still DO NOT make a decent living at it. That's the point.
Plus, the Olympics last for a few weeks every two years. And that's assuming your sport is in both the summer and winter events. Most people don't rely on a gig as infrequent as that to make a living. If their sport is popular, they should be able to make enough money by competing in other events outside the Olympics.
Don't get me wrong, I think the IOC and the Olympics is a scam in general. And the fact that the executives are making bank off the sponsorship money is pretty disgusting. But it's unfair to blame the IOC for athletes living in poverty.
Are any sports in both?
Well, you can do it every two years if you are a multisport athlete with at least one sport in each summer and winter games. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_athletes_who_competed_...
Which none are.
> If their sport is popular, they should be able to make enough money by competing in other events outside the Olympics.
Until fairly recently (and still for wrestling; boxing, IIRC, was another hold out until this Olympics) amateur status requirements prohibited that in most Olympic sports (though a number of countries evaded that, which is what led to the rules being abandoned.)
Olympic regulations regarding amateur status of athletes were eventually abandoned in the 1990s with the exception of wrestling, where the rules for participation still require amateur status rather than professional status for the safety of the participants. For the upcoming 2016 Summer Olympics professionals will be allowed to compete in boxing.
But some years ago, I made a simple decision: I no longer support any form of professional sports. And, sorry Olympic Committee, but what you have there are professional sports. With all the graft and corruption and self-centeredness I refuse to support.
As for the athletes? It has been quite apparent for considerable time what you're signing up for. And... many people lose their job, their career, every day. Individual, personal appeals are not going to sway me.
I do feel for those who use sports to climb out of disadvantageous situations. However, at this point society needs to find a better solution to this that the "going pro" lottery.
Not like my individual decision is going to lessen their chances, anyway. But if and when society starts to say "enough", maybe society will also find fairer means of providing opportunity.
This is not true in Canada, although it's a bit of a secret. I wonder if the reporter is ignorant about the situation in the USA as well.
Olympics hopefuls in Canada get generous stipends from the Federal Government to train all year. The amount they get is $25,000 to $50,000 (Canadian) per year depending on various factors such as their location. It's also apparently tax free; keep that in mind when comparing it to average incomes.
Hundreds (perhaps thousands) of "hopefuls" get these grants in Canada. Only a fraction of them get into the Olympics. It's a semi-secret use of tax payer money (and unnecessary and unfair in my opinion). Not a single person who've I mentioned this to was aware of it!
Source: I know two such hopefuls who got this money. (They didn't get into the Olympics.)
The U.S. Olympic Committee was created by Congress and given exclusive right to the Olympic marks in the U.S. (the rings, flag, name, etc)--that is the extent of the federal govt. support.
Most of the USOC's revenues come from Olympic mark licensing deals, and other corporate sponsorships. There are some personal and foundation grants too. It's all private cash though.
"USWNT will generate $8 million more in revenue for U.S. Soccer than the USMNT."
On that note, I do agree that the Womens team should be paid equally, if not more, if only for the reason that their earning power during their career isn't anywhere near what the Mens team.
Given how poorly most platforms compensate content providers, I see no inconsistency here.
It could very well be that the best athletes are already just going where the money is, and we're getting those that have a burning desire to be in "The Olympics" rather than making a lot of money.
American Ninja Warrior (and the Japanese show that it came from) show some amazing athletes in every contest. If those people trained for the Olympics instead, I think they could be rather good at it. And many of them are just regular people who decided to try this crazy contest. Now that people have started training specifically for Ninja Warrior, the obstacles have gotten a lot harder. This year's are pretty hardcore, IMO.
One of the things that I sort of like about it is that most of them do seem to have jobs and such. Most people aren't IMHO-wrecking their lives to compete. Though the description of what it takes to "walk on" is a bit BS; people literally quitting their job to camp out for a week or two is a problem, ANW, not something to brag about. Most people don't quit their job, but still, that is an awful lot of time to ask people to piss away to show up on your show.
The benefits of gov work such as unfettered job security and good pensions which draw people (although not necessarily talented people) are probably not available with IOC. So without good pay you're left it mostly altruistic reasons (loving sports) or for the 'fun' of it.
IOC needs smart business people like any organization. Running the biggest events in the world smoothly and coordinating a massive organization with thousands of people of different nationalities is hard work.
From that baseline of expectation, the numbers they are putting up (such as $250k for the president) don't seem very high at all.
Also would have been interesting to hear more about these IOC positions, how are the people selected for these roles and how often do they change? I bet the answer is nepotism. FIFA is another rotten nest.
The people doing the selections should be formal Olympic athletes.
Most are already making more than enough before the Olympics comes around, so whatever they make at the Olympics is just a bonus.
By the way, what the USA pays medal winners is not bad for a few days of work.
The construction workers getting cheated of their wages in Sochi, and deported from Russia, however, is an obscenity the IOC should be taken to task for.
xlayn principle:
Any organism conformed of several type of different units with one of them capable of political capabilities will transform itself to have a head (read it as president, board of directors, human head as brain, stakeholders, etc) and will transform itself such as that the head become the goal at the expense of the rest of the organism.
e.g.
-head decides to overeat to enjoy the related pleasure
at the expense of other organs in the body
-company shift objective to make money to the board of
directors at the expense of the employees
-humans as the "reason de etre" of the world destroys
every other specie for the sake of their benefit...
-this article...
-corrupt governments