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.
