Ruining the validity of the Olympics

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My kid asked me what ruined the spirit of the Olympics.

I told her that the USA ruined the spirit of the Olympics.. as popular as the American "Dream Team" was in the USA..
The plain cold hard fact of the matter is, it was a completely illegal team.

Once you accept money to earn a living by playing sports and trade the love of the game in for needing competitition statistics in order to continue being accepted as a paid athlete...
You can no longer play in the Olympics.

That was the rules back then and because that is nolonger the case, it lost its validity.
It is now BS.

When precisely do you think the spirit of the Olympics was ruined? I think it started going downhill when all athletes started wearing clothes.

Edited: Duh. You mentioned the Dream Team which was in 1992. Do you even remember that Olympics? You certainly can't remember what they were like before then.

Last edited by TwilightPrincess on 02 Jun 2023, 11:09 am, edited 2 times in total.

Barring paid athletes was basically about elitism. Only the wealthy could afford to be unpaid athletes, so it discriminated against athletes who had to rely on their talents to pay their bills.

Beyond that, with some sports it's impossible to have a tournament of the best without including pros. Without pro baseball, hockey, soccer and similar players it reduces the talent pool significantly as well as essentially taking all of the top talent out of contention.

How can a bunch of never-was scrubs really represent the highest level of the game?

and who gave your kid the idea that the olympics were ruined? Was that you also?

My 12 year old son thinks the Olympics are better than ever now that skateboarding is included.

I love Olympics. I like the vignette stories about individual athletes, especially the ones who overcame great adversity to train and get to the games. I don't care if people win or lose. I don't care what country they're from. I just like seeing the emotion on their faces, and the pride they feel in themselves and their tenacity. The love among families and friends is more important to me than any medal. I cry at Olympics more than I do in the rest of my life combined.

This happens to be 1992, but that's not the point.

Derek Redmond and his father:



https://youtu.be/t2G8KVzTwfw

My daughter was born in 92.

Her father was in grad school and spent hours up with her at night watching the Olympics so I could sleep. As a teen, when she heard Bob costas, she said “there’s just something about that man’s voice that is so comforting and relaxing…” I laughed and told her why.

She says the Olympics was ruined when he retired.

Money has this unfortunate tendency to ruin a lot of things.

Anyone else remember when summer and winter games were on the same year?

I loved that. It made the whole year seem like a bigger event.

Now I lose track of what's going on, which one is training, and even the locations.

There's so many locations now with alternating summer / winter, that I can't keep straight.

All I know is they happen on even numbered years.

What's happening next year?

Ever since I can remember folks have complained about the opposite. About the hypocrisy of the ideal amateurism in the Olympics. How international politics contaminated it.

Dont really have strong feelings one way or the other about it.

If anything contaminated it, it was the judging scandals and political payoffs behind it.
I suppose the drug testing scandals too.

Agree - just have to add that Olympic men's soccer is deliberately not an elite competition because FIFA want the World Cup to be the pinnacle instead. Players must be under 23, with up to three exceptions. As a result, teams generally do not take it as seriously as the World Cup. This has resulted in some major teams having poor records, and mid-level sides (Nigeria, Mexico) having an opportunity for success.

The UK has only entered one team in 50 years and is still the third most successful side... although that's largely because we included professionals in our first couple of teams at a time when it was strictly amateur (and we were basically the only country in the world with a professional game).

I enjoy watching the Olympics. I like it when people from all over the world get together and show that they can compete in sport in a peaceful manner. I grew up thinking that the world should be that way.

I like the bmx and mountain biking

If anything could be said to ruin the Olympics, although I still very much enjoy them, I would say it was the year politics got involved and half the world boycotted. The Olympics was supposed to transcend that.

Most of you are too young, but I attended the 1984 Olympics. Even if it was marred by politics, it was still an amazing event. My favorite ended up being rowing, an event without much of a commercial side, and we actually ran into the gold medal team in the public village after the event.

In some ways I think allowing paid athletes to compete was a necessary move. As funeralxempire noted, only elites were able to compete under the old rules, something that is still true in equestrian competition and similar. The old rules also favored communist block countries, which faced no constraints from voters on their pursuit of glory by building publicly funded winning athletes. Of course, the opposite is now true, as paid athletics thrive more in wealthy, commercialized countries, so there is still a more proper balance that needs to be found.

It should also be noted that the Olympics never totally lived up to the vision, and the idea that they once did involves a lot of historical wishing thinking.

It's a system that needs constant checks and balances, but if TPTB can focus on the goal, they will always have value.

Wut?

That's a strange metric.

Top level athletes need more money than they get in virtually every country on Earth.

The amount of time & energy it takes to train to that level means that people cannot Also work full time+ at paid jobs in order to pay for housing/food/medicine/clothing etc + all of the additional costs of being a Top level athlete.. additional nutrition costs, trainers/coaches/kinesiologists/physiotherapists etc etc.

How exactly is someone supposed to train themselves up to the elite levels of olympic competitiveness if they're not allowed to compete in their sport professionally or accept donations/corporate sponsorships?

We should look at athletes getting paid professionally as advancing sport & human competition, as it allows people to train harder and push the envelope of human performance further than ever before. In our capitalist society, without funding for athletes to spend their time training, we'd still have a bunch of weekend warriors instead of people at the Peak of human possibility.

There should be more money for athletes, not less. More for artists, too. There's enough money in society to buy time for the best of the best to pursue their passions to the absolute pinnacle of their possible performance & achievements.