For years now, the Olympics have represented the top of athleticism in multiple sports around the world. Many athletes who become Olympians work and sweat for years to become one among the world’s best in their sport. While this is meritorious, the fact of the matter is that many countries are simply striving to dominate the medals podium. The U.S. is no different. However, while the Americans’ efforts in Tokyo have produced results that might be the envy of the world, they have fallen short of their recent lofty standards. The U.S. Olympic Team will not equal its haul of 121 medals in 2016, and trails China in total gold medals to date. In team sports, there have been a number of upsets, including Canada’s winning the gold in women’s soccer and Japan’s winning the gold in baseball over the Team U.S.A. Host nations generally do better than normal because they invest heavily in sports in the years leading up to the Games. In this case, Japan, with its third place medals tally, nearly doubled its previous gold medal tally for the summer Olympics.
There are those that will argue that the Olympics should be more about athletes doing their personal bests, representing competitive excellence and true sportsmanship. There should be no return to the earlier Olympics of the sixties through eighties when the former Soviet Union and Eastern European block used the events to demonstrate so-called superiority in athleticism within Communist systems. Of course, the end results became more important than the means, resulting in the use of performance enhancement tactics by athletes from these countries. Thank goodness, the International Olympic Committee, as the guardian of the Olympic Games and the leader of the Olympic Movement, put an end to this by severely penalizing the culprits and introducing tougher drug-screening for the athletes.
However, for the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee (USOC) today, the total medal counts apparently both matter and don’t. Nevertheless, its executives maintain that they want to win as many medals as possible, sometimes at the cost of placing an inordinate amount of pressure on their top athletes to perform well. The consequences can be devastating for some athletes, as demonstrated by Simone Biles who withdrew from the women’s team gymnastics final, citing mental heath concerns as she attempts to protect “her body and mind.” Due often to unreasonable expectations by the media and the USOC, the added pressure and publicity can prevent athletes from performing at their best, as has very likely been the case in these latest Olympics.
Needless-to-say, this issue is not just one that the U.S. Olympic Team must face, but is one which athletes from other countries must constantly deal with. Obviously, Chinese athletes in particular are expected to perform well and win medals at the summer Olympics. Other countries such as Australia and Canada with smaller populations, some 25 million and 37 million people respectively, generally can only hope to improve their standings over previous summer Olympics. Whatever the expectations, one can only hope that the Olympics remain a global outlet for the best of amateur sports — despite the fact that many professionals participate in the games. It’s nice to see that in some sports, such as in track and field, diving, rowing, gymnastics and swimming, the U.S. no longer can be expected to dominate. For the sake of a more representative Olympics, let’s hope that this is the case in future games.
FROLITICKS 