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.

And while the details differed between all of those groups, invariably within the specific context of each one each of those factors (along with others I’m sure I ignored) was present in one form or another.   Take any one factor away and the whole thing tends to collapse.  Bulgaria’s incessant politicking, the dissolution of the GDR, as soon as one aspect of the overall system went away, the rest of the system collapsed upon itself.  But it’s ultimately the synergistic whole that is relevant.

The only time that a single solitary factor is relevant is if it’s the ONLY one missing in the equation; in that case shoring up that one limiter might be sufficient to fix the ‘problem’.  At least assuming it can be fixed easily.  That is, when the entire rest of the infrastructure is there but only that one thing is missing (as might have been argued to be the case for UK Track cycling where it was the infusion of huge amounts of money that got the ball rolling).

As a final point, if there’s anything else I’ve gotten across is that you simply can’t consider the issue of sporting dominance (in general or when looking at a specific sport) outside of the specific cultural (and geographic and the rest) issues.  The entire Soviet approach came out of the sociocultural environment in which it developed as did the GDR’s and all of the rest.

Continue reading Why the US Sucks at Olympic Lifting: Part 9