Crossroads (Toward Philippine economic and social progress)
Philippine Star, 8 August 2012

 

The world’s sporting attention this time of year is focused on the London Olympics 2012. The summer games come in four year cycles. For many athletes and national sports associations comprising a variety of sporting events, the Olympics are a culmination of years of preparation for the altar of competition.

Three different perspectives of the Olympics. There may be three distinct ways to view the Olympics.

First, it is a big sporting event for the participating nations. Some look at the Olympics as the climax to their preparation to maintain national prestige and competitive effectiveness. The games are a measure of national prowess especially in relation to others.

Second, it is an individual event for the athlete: it is the time when personal ambition, sacrifice, training, and competitiveness are all tested before the world.

Third, not least especially for the host nation , it is an event to showcase a nation’s numerous assets. For two weeks, London is the center of the sporting world. As host city for Great Britain, it is a moment to shine and to earn further kudos as it displays its cultural, historical and business attractions.

The medal winning countries. While each participating nation has a view of what is possible in terms of its chances, there are expectations about which countries and athletes will romp away with the medals.

Medal-winners are dominantly remembered and projected. Records are etched in memory and get re-polished in media hype. A factor that often heightens expectations is that of stories about the quests of individuals or of group of athletes which get translated into prospects for the countries themselves.

In recent decades, the Olympics also became a symbol of the contest between rival economic systems and political creeds. It is also seen as a game of rivalry between pairs of countries.

In the 1972 Munich Olympics during the height of the Cold War, the USSR and the US tangled for the honors. But the USSR followed by East Germany and their East European bloc nations garnered many of them.

The US and other countries whose economic systems were based on capitalism came in second – the US, West Germany, Japan and United Kingdom could not match the medal harvest of the USSR and its allies.

The Soviet Union method of harnessing athletic power was through a highly centralized state-sponsored program. The Western nations, led by the US, used a decentralized approach, letting the private sector train their athletes.

By the Atlanta Olympics in 1996, medal harvest became very much dispersed among a wider spread of countries. Tectonic changes in world geopolitics brought about the collapse of communism by 1990. The USSR became many new republics, but with Russia remaining intact. Germany was re-united, with East Germany getting absorbed as a new nation dominated by the West German capitalistic part.

During the Beijing Olympics in 2008, the winning profile showed a new trend. The US asserted its sports dominance. But China – the host of that year and a follower of the state-supported system of athletic preparations – came almost from nowhere to play a very dominant position.

Whereas before, the leading medal winners were confined to established world economic and industrial powers, after the Beijing Olympics, new Olympic nations were clearly announcing their new status.

This was especially true for South Korea and Australia. This trend became evident by the time of the 1988 Seoul Olympics. South Korea, in particular, had edged out Japan’s long established dominance among the Asian countries.

An economic explanation of winning countries. An economic explanation of winning countries can be constructed. Indeed, the Financial Times (FT) uses and informs its readers through such a study.

For a number of days running now, this publication has been giving a day-to-day account of the predicted number of medals won by the major participant countries for its readers. Such prediction is discussed against actual performance. A plus-or-minus error term also tells how the predicted number of wins performed against actual winnings.

The model represents the way most economists and statisticians predict the outcomes of (economic) events. The FT Olympic model had the following factors for predicting outcome: the country’s population size, GDP per head, past performance, and host country advantage.

There you are. Population gives a country the athletes to choose from. The larger a country’s population, provided it is healthy and not hungry, the more potential athletes it can produce.

GDP per head shows how capable is a nation in raising economic output. High output per head makes it possible to build public sports facilities and to support schools, communities, and sports associations. Hence, athletes are well enabled in their quest for medals.

A country with higher GDP per head provides sufficient time for its population to enjoy leisure. Leisure is the foundation of many sports. In decentralized economies, leisure fuels the commercial support for sports leagues – soccer, baseball, football, basketball and other individual sports.

Factors that associate with development. A high GDP per head is a measure of material possibilities for its citizenry to achieve a better standard of living, good health, and superior literacy. Literacy makes possible a wider choice of sports. And a healthy population makes sports of all kinds likely.

Past performance provides an indication of present ability. As among nations, this dictum is true also in personal development. Your ability last year to perform a given task does not diminish this year if you continuously maintain your training level. In sports, this is the case. Athletes train continuously, not sporadically, or else the competition overtakes them.

The edge in focus and allocation of effort. The last factor considered is idiosyncratic in that it concerns only the host country. Yet, like all unique factors, often this could explain an inordinate harvest of medals. As host country, it is utterly under stress to focus all its efforts on itself and on its goals.

In the past, China, South Korea, Australia, Canada, Japan did perform particularly well in their medal tallies when they hosted the Olympics. Perhaps this also explains how a nation, once it has experienced hosting the Olympics, learns from the experience and uses it to sustain its athletic prowess in future years.