Reply to why is team USA stinking?

Forum Index » Sports General Discussion

Reply to "why is team USA stinking?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]You have to acknowledge China is kicking the U.S.’s butt - they are ascendant and we are a country in decline. [/quote]

Hmmm it's more mixed than that. China is winning a lot of medals at these Olympics. As a country this is the kind of competition they are good at because they have lots of people and a willingness to centralize their approach to winning medals. So they'll pluck the most promising young divers and shooters and archers out of school at age 9 or 10 and pay for them to train around the clock so that they can go win an Olympic medal for China at age 17 or whatever. It's very efficient and effective. Certainly more so than the US's approach which involves no centralized organization for developing young athletes and depends entirely upon people independently deciding they want to pursue these sports and then having the independent means to do so.

On the other hand if you want to get a strong college or graduate education or succeed in global business odds are good that you want to go to the US. Even if you can succeed at high levels in these areas in China the quality of life isn't great and the government is oppressive. Also even those athletes who are being cultivated to compete in the Olympics are considered disposable in China -- if one of them flames out or gets hurt they will just be punted back to wherever they came from and replaced with one of the other billion people vying for that spot. So it's not even clear that the athletes themselves would rather compete for China than the US even as they win golds over US athletes.

China is certainly increasing it's global power and it does use the Olympics to try and assert its dominance. But is it even possible for China to actually supersede the US in industry and culture without proper democracy and more liberated capitalism -- I really just don't think so. It's a heck of a lot easier to create an Olympic diving gold medalist than to create the proper environment in which a company like Amazon or Universal Studios can thrive and become a global powerhouse.[/quote]

Having state sponsored doping helps especially when wada helps cover it up [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics