I promise, no more endless bits about sociology and American sport. In Why the US Sucks at Olympic Lifting: Part 13 I gave the final necessary background to understand some of the screwiness of sports in this country including a look at gender issues along with the amateur professional issue. Frankly, given how messed up the system is and given the nature of the Olympics and the requirement for amateur status, it’s amazing that America does anything at the Olympics. Yet we do. Quite a lot of something actually. Let’s start with the American sports ‘system’.
The American No-System Sports System
As I discussed at some point last week, the US is very decentralized. The spread of our country, the local pockets of culture, the immigrant nature of our people keeps pretty much everything in this country from having much overall consistency except existing under the same flag. Case in point, laws can vary drastically between different states. So what is legal or illegal in New York may be illegal or legal elsewhere. There are no consistent standards in this country except for big, loud, stupid, Michael Bay movies and nobody using metric. Maybe a couple of others.
And just as there is little else centralized or consistent in the US, our approach to sports is no different. Because there is just no real sports system in this country, at least not in the sense that it existed in many other countries. And this just isn’t a Communist vs. Western thing. Canada has Sports Canada overseeing it, Australia has the AIS. America has nothing of the kind and so far as I can tell it’s the only country that is set up this way. Inasmuch as anything is set up. Mostly it seems, like Kenya, to just have sort of happened this way and you can be sure that it’s never going to change. Americans don’t like change either.
At most there is the USOC overseeing Olympic issues as a whole, individual sports all have their own federations (or in the case of powerlifting, 37 different competing federations; professional boxing suffers this as well) but that’s about as far as it goes. There is no singular governing body, no consistent coaching philosophy or theory or training program or even requirements to become a coach.
Continue reading Why the US Sucks at Olympic Lifting: Part 14