a Little Light

    958 medals, 17 days, 132 new Olympic records, 43 new world records, and 1 wholesome pounding courtesy of the Chinese later, we have reached the conclusion of the 2008 Summer Olympics. It’s been an amazing and bumpy ride for Team USA, but once we look past Michael Phelps’ extraordinary performance in the swimming events, we begin to realize one thing: Team USA better take 2012 in London seriously, or we are witnessing the decline of American athleticism on the global stage.

    If the USA continues to harbor and shelter its best athletes for her personal selfish and entertainment purposes, it will never have the strength to compete against the best of the world. For example, baseball is considered America’s pastime and America’s game. But we took bronze because we refused to send our best baseball players such as Derek Jeter, David Wright, Josh Beckett, or A-Rod. Because it would inconvenience the MLB season, we were forced to send a scruffy group of armatures and prospects. It was a miracle we even medaled. Imagine how much greater interest American’s would hold in Olympics baseball if we sent a Dream Team of American players like we do for basketball. It would also increase the marketability of baseball overseas, and may have saved the sport from Olympic extinction. Just look at what our Redeem Team accomplished in Beijing. By actually sending some of our best athletes in basketball, we were able to comfortably defeat the opposition in bringing the gold back to the country which invented the sport.

    Of course, for the USA to return to Olympic dominance, we need to not only send our best athletes, but we also need to begin developing Olympians, not marketable athletes. The young children in our society, especially male, with athletic potential are generally bred to be football and basketball players; which happens to account for a grand total of one out of over 300 events in these Olympic Games. Sorry, but two individuals participating in two artistic gymnastics events has a more significant impact than the entire USA basketball team on the gold medal count. For the record, China won 8 artistic gymnastics gold, while USA won 2 gold.

    Try and envision what may happen if we had the best athletes within America train for the Olympics rather than the Super Bowl or World Series. Tackle Walter Jones from the Seahawks at 6’5″ and 325 lbs could have trained for weightlifting rather than blocking and possibly have given USA its first weightlifting medal for 2008. Of course, he makes millions from the NFL and conventional wisdom says he would be crazy to pass that up. But imagine if Dwight Howard was trained as a boxer instead of our center. Or if Jason Kidd’s vision was used for rifle shooting, where there are nine men’s gold’s to be won, instead of dropping dimes. The lure of a huge paycheck prevents us from producing the best Olympians we are capable of.

    According to the World Watch Institute, China has a population of around 1.3 billion people. In contrast, USA stands in at 300 million, or 0.3 billion. We can no longer send our second tier athletes and expect to leisurely take home the gold, just ask our basketball team of 2004. With China’s resurgence as a world power, we are helplessly out resourced and out classed. Which is why if USA intends to dominate the only category which matters to the rest of the world, the gold medal count, it’s time to begin training our best athletes to be more than entertainers, but Olympians.