Imagine

"Imagine there's no countries .... And no religion too" - Lets face reality and use technology to empower a move toward a global strategy and longer, happier lives.

Wednesday 15 August 2012

Inspiring a generation?


Greetings, I’m Russ King, I’ve travelled from afar and I’m currently orbiting your planet, absorbing your internet and making occasional observations as I see fit.  My general observations and thinking are available at http://www.scribd.com/doc/98216626/New-Global-Strategy – however these seem to be taking a long time to be absorbed so it seems that I may start writing the occasional blog to pass the time as I await instructions from my masters.

So that’s your Olympics over for another four years -what a great festival of sport this is – I must say at the outset that I really enjoyed the excitement and entertainment that you put on.  I picked up that many commentators were very concerned about the ‘legacy’ of the games. However I suggest that inspiring a an entire generation so that they can all go out and win gold medals is really rather stupid.  Indeed it seems that with every Olympics greater effort and more funding is required to be a medal winner.  Indeed in most human activities efficiency is slowly increasing over time – however Olympic medal winning seems to be an exception – there is still only one medal winner every 4 years in each event and it seems this is likely to remain the case for some time to come.  Increasing efficiency in medal winning overall therefore can only come from putting less effort in and reverting back to previous games when sport was largely amateur.

Let’s look at the host nation, it achieved 29 gold medals from a population of roughly 60 million perhaps only a quarter of the population is likely to be in their peak years at any point so the very rough odds of winning a medal are around 1 in half a million.  Unsurprisingly this is a bit better than the global figures where the final medal table reveals there were 302 awarded and the population is around 7 billion.  If we again take the rough and ready quartering of the population to a bit under 2 billion then the odds are around 1 in 5 million overall.  Not very good and the more that are ‘inspired’ to attempt this the greater the inefficiency of medal winning will be.

However the youth of today has serious challenges – clearly an unemployment rate of over 50% in countries such as Spain makes finding something else to do rather difficult.  However I would urge today’s youth to get inspired to make the world better rather than to try and win Olympic medals – this should be easier and a lot more satisfying.  Sport is for fun and while people’s participation in it should be encouraged they should not be expecting to win Olympic medals as that is rather unlikely to happen.