If You Build It, They Will Come

So I'm told that there are these things called Olympics at which people, like, compete and stuff. I wouldn't know, because I've been assiduously avoiding the TV for the past few weeks. But at any rate, a bunch of my friends keep saying "Wow, it sure sucks that we're not getting more medals. We need to spend more on Olympic athletes!".

First, I don't think that the notion of a country winning medals, as opposed to a bunch of athletes winning medals, makes any sense, but I've long since accepted that I'm in the minority on that point.

But let's examine the second contention: that more money should be spent to send a few people to a week-long party/orgy/competition to get pieces of metal. The typical justification that my friends give (having long since given up trying to convince me about national pride etc.) is that it encourages young kids to get active, thus reducing the obesity epidemic and so on. I'd suggest that maybe it makes more sense to give ordinary people opportunities to get moderately active rather than spending it on relatively few high-performance athletes who will likely be active (albeit perhaps not full-time and at the same level of competitiveness --- though since I don't care about national pride, I really don't care whether or not athletes nominally representing this country are competitive) regardless of whether or not my tax dollars pay them.

It strikes me that, given that demand greatly exceeds supply for things like, say, indoor soccer field time, or ice time at skating rinks, that it might make more sense to spend money on addressing these insufficiencies first. Since the amount of money going into amateur sport seems to be more or less capped by the fact that it doesn't seem to be a public priority, it seems to me to make sense to cut Olympic funding to pay for more rinks, more field[s] of dreams (pace W.P. Kinsella), and to subsidize little league fees for poor families. If, on the other hand, you're going to increase funding as a whole to amateur sport, it strikes me that you should still put that money to mass sport as opposed to elite sport, at least until all the demand for mass sport is satiated.

Now, one of my friends, in particular, claims that the Olympics inspire kids to want to play sports, and points to the massive increase in womens' hockey over the past few years, claiming that the addition of womens' hockey to the Olympics caused this. While this may or may not be true, she further claims that it's important that national teams be competitive in order to draw kids. As a rebuttal, I offer into evidence the abysmal ranking of the Canadian mens' soccer team: over the past decade, they've only rarely been over 50th in the world, more usually languishing in the doldrums below 80th. During that same time, however, the ranks of those playing soccer have increased dramatically. One can make the same point about alpine skiing, where the top-rated Canadians on the World Cup circuit are somewhere around 20th.

The kids already want to play: you don't need to convince them by having Olympians doing their stuff every few years. You need to give the kids the ability to play, first. Cut funding for the Olympics, and build soccer fields, build cricket pitches, build baseball diamonds, build skating rinks, and subsidize registration fees. That's the way to get the kids active.