Month: August 2011

And if everything I talked about in Why the US Sucks at Olympic Lifting Part 10 weren’t true, it gets even worse. Again, no summary from last time, just read it if you didn’t already.  Back into the fray about America as a country finally moving to sports.

Big, Dumb, Loud and Just Intensely Proud of It

Americans are not, by and large, a nuanced people. We like stuff, big, dumb and loud. Like our country, like our people. Like a Michael Bay movie. I was only half joking when I said that our culture is based around mom, baseball, apple pie, rampant obesity, Michael Bay movies and breast implants. It’s not really a joke.

We are a more or less ignorant (not the same as stupid) country.  Worse yet, we revel in our ignorance. Ignorant and proud, USA#1. Some appalling number of Americans can’t find their own home state on a map. … Keep Reading

Continuing from Why the US Sucks at Olympic Lifting: Part 9 I’m going to continue the discussion of overall US culture by looking at politics and attitude, tomorrow and Friday I’ll actually start talking about sports.  No need for summarizing, hit the link and read if you didn’t already.  Let’s get to it.

Quick note: I’m quite sure that someone with a background in economics will get really upset about the next section, being concerned that I over-generalized some factor or left out some incredibly detailed nuance of the system that is just critically important to their mental health that I discuss in detail.  Just keep in mind what I’m doing here which is NOT trying to write the be-all end-all series on Capitalism.  Or America.

Or a whole bunch of other topics that folks have been busting my nuts for skimming details on because they can’t seem to keep in mind what my actual topic is. … Keep Reading

And finally, after all of that, I can turn towards the United States and start moving towards my point.  Over the last 2 weeks or so I bored you to death with Kenyan distance running dominance, talked about UK track cycling, the Soviet sports machine, East Germany, Bulgarian Ol’ing, Australian swimming and finally covered the current Chinese sports machine in Why the US Sucks at Olympic Lifting: Part 8 yesterday.

If you got anything from my endless repetition I hope it’s this: consistent success or outright dominance in sport is universally predicated on a complex interplay of factors ranging from sociocultural, political, economic, physiological, etc.  You need the numbers of athletes going into the sport which means having facilities and availability, along with coaching, the athletes need support, incentives to go into the sport and put themselves through the training, etc. etc.  You simply can’t speak of one factor in isolation without considering the others.… Keep Reading

Continuing from Part 7, one last stop on the historical and world-tour of sports dominance before I can spend another 80 weeks talking about the US (ok, maybe only 2 more weeks).  And that stop is in Communist china.  Because, as you’ll see when I quote some statistics below, the Chinese showed some outright ass-kicking dominance in Beijing in 2008, at least in the handful of sports that they targeted.  But I’m getting a bit ahead of myself.

In many ways, China represents, in a sense, the logical end result/culmination of everything that had gone before in both the earlier Communist and Socialist sports machines.  Basically, they seem to have taken a bit of the best from each of the systems and integrated them into an optimized whole.  Hopefully this will make more sense in a second and, frankly, I await a flood of Chinese sport secrets to flood the market any day now.… Keep Reading

Having looked in some detail at the former Soviet Sports machine in Why the US Sucks at Olympic Lifting: Part 6, I’m going to move somewhat chronologically to talk about the East German sports machine (dominant in about the 80’s) along with Bulgarian Olympic lifting (which actually overlapped with both).  While both share a lot of similarities to what the Soviets had done, there are a few key differences worth noting. Then just to fill some space I’ll briefly talk about Australian swimming.

For the groups I’m going to talk about today, I’m not going to do the subsections I’ve been using. This is to prevent me from being excessively wordy and it is getting repetitive at this point. Mainly I’ll sum up where things were the same and focus on difference and how they impacted on the end result in any given system.

I am, gradually, getting to a point.… Keep Reading