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While Olympics come with lots of excitement, generating lots of stories of inspiration, emotions, and hard work by individual athletes, serious questions arise for its fairness to poor countries.
History has shown that out of 28 times the games have been held, only 19 countries have hosted them, and some of them multiple times. 22 cities have hosted the games. Here is the list of countries.
The observation is that only wealthy countries have hosted the games. Also, those countries send most of the athletes to the games. Some countries have athletes in single digits.
In the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, 13 nations had just two athletes, while the largest team was from the United States with 613 members.
Is Olympic a rich countries club with other nations participating, just as guests? Unfortunately, only a few countries have won the most medals consistently, ever since the Olympics started.
* Indicates host countries
Over the years, the cost of hosting the Olympics has blown to gigantic size—much to the arrangements of tourists, staff, security and improvement in training facilities.
For the summer Olympics, the international Olympic committee requires the host country to have 40,000 hotel rooms and a games village to accommodate 15,000 athletes, officials and staff.
As a reverse calculation, only cities as rich, with a large population and have a future of servicing those many rooms will be suitable to host.
These calculations for infrastructure are over and above the total cost incurred. For example, in recent times, 2012 London Summer Olympics cost $ 14 Billion, and 2020 Tokyo was about $28 Billion.
Taking account of the additional cost of dealing with pandemics during the Tokyo Games, the range for the cost incurred by the country to host the Olympics is about 20 billion.
How many countries could afford this expense and can utilize the infrastructure in the future?
Athens Olympics had put the country in debt that it cannot service even after 24 years. Moreover, the economic hardship it brought to the Greeks manifested into many other socio-economic problems.
The net effect of this cost is that those sports have become expensive too for aspiring athletes to pursue. The cheapest is track and field, the most expensive ones being horse riding, golf, yacht sailing and indoor cycling events.
It takes about a million dollars to own a horse apart from the cost of transportation to various events. For a rider, they need to have multiple horses. For sure, it is not for sportsperson of ordinary economic means.
The same holds good for Sailing and Golf.
There is a commercial, economic, social and sporting benefit for the host country. The infrastructure improves due to the construction of housing, stadiums and transportation.
Tourism gets promoted, which last much later than the Olympic event. The world gets to know more about the country.
Economically, the country benefits from sponsorships, television and broadcasting rights, local business and employment generation. The question is why hosting the games is a musical chair between rich nations of the world.
It is also possible that developing nations can host with the aid of universal funding through investments and distributed profitability. However, if countries like Egypt, the Philippines, Botswana or Jordon want to hold Olympics, they will never reap the benefits in the current model.
Throughout those 28 games, the top 10 countries winning the most medals are the ones who are G7 and developed economies.
United States (2980 medals)
United Kingdom (948 medals)
Germany (892 medals)
France (874 medals)
Italy (742 medals)
China (696 medals)
Sweden (661 medals)
Australia (562 medals)
Japan (555 medals)
Russia (547 medals)
Then some countries have recently got their first Olympic gold, like Singapore in 2016, Bahrain in 2012, Kuwait 2016, Jordan 2016, Vietnam 2016, and the Philippines in 2021. So there is an imbalance in sports that has lasted for more than a century now.
Not many would like to evaluate the country's performance at the Olympics other than the number of medals won. Behind the medals is a vital interplay of social, economic, and political freedom.
If there are not enough institutions supporting a sport, there is a less likely chance of securing a medal. Like India, with a population of 1.3 billion, while producing 20 million cycles each year, the highest globally, there is not a single medal ever won in Olympics.
On the other hand, countries in Africa with a tiny population are winning more medals in distance running than any other developed or developing countries.
Hence two crucial indicators of countries performance should be published. It will give a realistic picture of a country's sporting performance.
· Per-capita demographic ranking — number of medals per million population of the country.
· Per-GDP demographic ranking — number of medals per million dollars of the country's gross domestic product (GDP).
Sports have become competitive, and most of them require decades of practice. As a result, the shelf life of the sporting career is short and sometimes no more than one Olympic.
In countries with inequitable wealth distribution and economic freedom restricted, the sportsperson ends up in poverty or low income.
Some sports require extraordinary infrastructure as a necessary condition to start learning the sport, like indoor cycling, which requires an expensive velodrome or a 30 feet deep pool for diving.
However, unlike track and field events, the runners have more freedom to practice in any place suitable.
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In countries with inequitable wealth distribution and economic freedom restricted, the sportsperson ends up in poverty or low income
The Olympic committee must avoid sports with global popularity, separately holding world championships and having mega funding. For example, sports like golf, football, tennis, horse riding already have multibillion sponsorships.
Therefore, their place in Olympics already is duplication and promoting an imbalance in competition.
Similarly, here is the list of sports added to the next Olympics. These included sports aren't played in the majority of the countries, like Rugby, Breakdancing, BMX cycling, Skateboarding and Surfing. Many countries do not have a coast or culture to take up surfing.
Is it fair for most countries that are not playing these sports to lose out without participating? They may spend on infrastructure to promote the sport never played in their country.
It seems the number of sports in the Olympics have saturated. They need to be optimized. If a particular sport is popular in at least 50% of participating countries, it makes a good case for inclusion in the Olympics.
Following are the sports to be played in the 2024 Olympics. It will be a good exercise for the readers to judge how many sports are prevalent in your country from the list below.
Conclusion
A paradigm shift is necessary if the Olympics have to be a real 21st-century celebration of human endurance. It should be a consorted effort of all the nations to uplift all sportsperson.
The objective of the Olympics is not to promote already rich sports or sports played in developed countries but to provide opportunities to athletes from impoverished nations; together, the International Olympic Committee must work to secure sportsperson economic future.
They can either do so by giving country-specific prize money. It will attract more and more talent from impoverished nations. Today, many sporting talents go underutilized or get abandoned just because the sportsperson has moved into a profession, in a compulsion to feed their family.
As a solution, if national Olympic committees provide universal funding, they will support athletes during their Olympics and after retirement. Unfortunately, some countries still do not have an Olympic committee, and fixing needs to start here.
Leaving it to the individual nations to allocate the funds impedes sports development. Though it may be interference into the country's internal affairs, by providing participating athletes with financial support, there still needs to be a solution from the international sporting community.
The Olympics should be all about sports.
https://www.distractify.com/p/how-much-does-an-olympic-dressage-horse-cost
https://www.wired.com/2012/08/carol-newman-cronin-sailing/
https://www.fixr.com/costs/build-swimming-pool
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Olympic_Games_host_cities
~ Supplementary Research, Akshita Gupta
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