Miles's blog

I have been watching with great interest the Olympic trials in swimming and track and field (not so much in gymnastics).  I love the Olympics and plan to watch pretty much non-stop once they start.  But I am troubled by the way they measure success in one way.  The amount of medals won is somewhat of an unfair measure.
 

Each race, for medal purposes, constitutes a single event.  So, for a sport like swimming, which has a couple of dozen races, athletes can take part in multiple events.  Michael Phelps won eight gold medals in a single Olympics.  Impressive, almost unbelievable, but how can we really measure that against other performances?


A decathlete has to perform 10 competitions over two days.  He can only compete in a single medal event.  So even though Bruce Jenner competed in 10 different competitions he walked away with only one gold medal.  Does that mean we should value his award less than Phelps’s eight?  I don’t think so, but it is hard to compare.

In the 1980 Winter Olympics Eric Heiden won five gold medals in speed skating.  That in and of itself incredible; but it is made all the more so when you consider that they only had five races.  Heiden won the sprints, and the endurance races.  Everything they had, he won.  For all Phelps accomplished, he did not approach anything like that. It would be as if he won the 50 meter freestyle sprint and the 1500 meter freestyle marathon.  No one has approached that kind of performance.  (Phelps, by the way, won three golds as part of relay teams.)  But Heiden can’t be proclaimed as America’s most prolific Olympic medalist.  (I doubt he really cares.  Following his skating career he became an esteemed physician who works closely with the American Olympic team.  How is it some people get both athletic talent and brains while the rest of us have trouble both tying our shoes and remembering what we read in the newspaper this morning?) 

At the same Olympics where Heiden achieved what I consider to be the greatest achievement in any single Olympics (Jim Thorpe  and Jesse Owens nothwithstanding), the American hockey team won their shocking  and thrilling gold medal (which will forever be memorialized in the Jeffco DA’s Office Intake Unit).  They had to play eight games over a span of two weeks.  For their victory each member of the team won a single gold medal.  This is true of every team sport at the Olympics, and of every sport which is contested by matches rather than races.  So Misty May and Kerri Walsh had to win seven matches for their golds, but again, they walked away with only one medal.  Michael Phelps’s suitcase qualified for excess weight charges while May and Walsh could carry their booty around their necks.  Is this fair?

I have a solution.  The size of the medal should reflect the amount of effort it required to win it.  The gold medal for, say, the 100 meter run, which takes about 10 seconds, would be the size of a postage stamp, which the gold for the marathon would be around the size of a basketball.  That is only fair since the marathon winner trains all year for a single event, while the winner of the 100 meters usually runs the 200 meters also and maybe a couple of relays.  Altogether he won’t race for even a full minute, while the marathoner toils in the hot sun for more than 2 hours.

Team sports would be made much bigger.  After all, water polo players have to be in the pool day after day with guys jumping on their heads and kneeing them in the groin, all the while worrying about drowning.  This is extraordinary effort.  Their gold should be perhaps the size of a movie poster.  Sailing, which unbelievably, is an Olympic sport, requires no more effort that sitting in an anachronistic vessel gliding over the ocean.  I don’t know how long those races last (I guess there are 11 separate events, can you believe it?) and I don’t care.  The effort expended to race a sailboat is so minimal, and their training so unathletic (I mean, really, they have to exert themselves every day for four years cranking a lever to trim a sail, big wow compared to marathon training), that if they should get a medal it deserves to be no bigger than a pierced earring stud or perhaps a straight pin.  I would be in favor of giving them a bigger medal, if not made of medal at all.  I could agree to a certificate about the size of an album cover. 

The way it is now, the top sailor gets the same gold as the swimmers who race for 10 kilometers in open water.  The fastest time in that event in 2008 was an hour and 51 minutes.  I know you are saying that is shorter than a marathon running race, and of course it is, but runners at least can look around and see scenery, and if they get tired they can just stop.  Swimmers who get tired in open water, while they are not only racing but dodging acquatic life, risk drowning.  So I think this medal should perhaps be the biggest of all.  Maybe about the size of a sports car. 

The only event perhaps less worthy of actual medals is equestrian dressage.  I understand that having horses do all those things is an unusual skill, and does take perhaps extensive training and knowledge, but I fail to see how it qualifies as a sport.  There is no more athleticism on behalf of equestrian competitors than professional eaters or Scrabble competitors.  These other competitions also require skills and take some level of training to accomplish, but they are not sports and for good reason are not part of the Olympics.  Equestrians should be considered the same.  Well, on second thought, I would give a gold medal about the size of an apple … to the horse.  Or maybe just the apple.