Part 7 - 13th August, 2024
Back in 1896 the “modern” Olympic Games were revived from the ancient Greek tradition by a wealthy Parisian named Pierre de Coubertin. During these 33rd Games the question “ou est Pierre?” has been used as an amuse bouche at stadiums, between games or sets, with camera crews searching for look-a-likes in the crowd to show on the big screen.
But maybe it’s a more interesting question than that?
What is old mate Pierre’s real legacy?
The even-more-Modern Pentathlon
Coubertin dreamed up the modern pentathlon for the Stockholm 1912 Olympic Games. He updated the original pentathlon by combining five disciplines which were all individual Olympic events:1
Fencing
Equestrian show jumping
Swimming
Shooting
Cross country running.
The pentathlon is a legacy that has stuck. But the “modern” part of the name has aged quite significantly. The events in Paris this week were the final time that show jumping will feature, after recent animal welfare concerns (unlike in other equestrian events at the Olympics pentathletes compete on unfamiliar horses). It will be replaced by mountain biking.
However, I think there is an opportunity to bring this event even more up-to-date. I propose the Actually Modern Pentathlon for Los Angeles 2028 - again, consisting of five existing Olympic disciplines:
Canoe Slalom
BMX Racing
Rock Climbing
Breaking
Skate Boarding
This multi-sport event would optimise for television spectacle rather than athletic performance, in line with the recent revealed preferences of the International Olympic Committee. I think it would fill the grandstands and be a ratings winner.
The Olympic Venn
Coubertin also designed possibly the most widely recognised brand in the world - the famous five interlocking rings that make up the logo of the Olympic Games.
We’re told these represent the five inhabited continents: Europe, Americas (strictly speaking two continents), Asia, Africa and “Oceania”.2 This leads to some awkward questions about which is which: Is Africa Black? Is Asia Yellow?
I also recall being told that at least one colour from the flag of every competing nation is included in the rings. That may have been true in 1896. I’m not sure if it still is?
This is what Pierre himself said (counting the white background as a sixth colour):
These five rings represent the five parts of the world now won over to the cause of olympism and ready to accept its fecund rivalries. What is more, the six colors thus combined reproduce those of all nations without exception.
Source: Olympics.com
So ¯\(ツ)/¯
I reckon it would be better to think of the Olympic Rings as a Venn Diagram…
For reasons that I’ve never properly understood many people who are into technology have a slightly allergic reaction to sport and active recreation. I often feel too sporty for techy people and too techy for sporty people. But there should be more overlap. Intersections are under-rated. There are several fascinating sports-tech projects I’ve been excited to be involved in, which have contributed in some small ways to gold medals that have been won this week.
So, what are the intersections in the Olympic Rings?
Let’s break the Olympic Games down into five component parts:
1. Celebration
The Olympic Games are a two-week long carnival.
If you wanted to design the perfect super-spreader event you’d struggle to do better. Large stadiums and endless custom-built grandstands are filled with tens of thousands of people from all over the world who are there to party. It’s a sea of flags (as long as they are not Russian or Taiwanese) and face paint and national colours. The music is booming and everybody chants and dances and sings (not just Sweet Caroline). At some venues like rowing and canoe, the drums are constant. It often feels like the results and performances are secondary to the festival. We’ve learned the words to the French National Anthem - the chorus goes: “Freed from desire. Mind and senses purified”.
This is a bit unfamiliar to the average New Zealand sports fan, raised on a steady diet of sitting quietly and solemnly watching the All Blacks, but is a vital part of what makes the Olympic Games special.
2. Promotion
The Olympic Games are the ultimate tourism promotion.
Cities spend hundreds of millions of dollars bidding for the right to host the games, and then after they “win”, billions more preparing for the influx of visitors. They build a new suburb to house the 10,000 athletes. They turn their transport infrastructure upside down for a couple of weeks - including dedicated lanes on the motorways for Olympic vehicles - buses for the competitors and endless motorcades for the dignitaries. In return they get to showcase their city to the world.
As I mentioned previously, Paris has done a particularly good job of this, thanks to some inspired venue choices - Grand Palais, Place de la Concorde, and Palace of Versailles. Compared to my previous visits the city has felt empty. Many locals have taken the opportunity to take their summer holidays out of town and rent their apartment on AirBnB - who just happen to be a new global sponsor of the Olympics. And the tens of thousands of extra police and military who were a constant presence made it feel very safe.
Watching the triathlon and cycling road race and, over the last couple of days, the marathons, weave through the streets of central Paris with sweeping made-for-television views, I’m sure there are many people around the world who have fallen in love with the city and vowed to one day visit. I’m not sure that Paris was especially short of tourists beforehand, but maybe the payback will be in years to come?
Just don’t hold your breath for an opportunity to swim in the Seine!
3. Profit
The Olympic Games are a big business.
The Olympic Rings are a privately owned brand which is aggressively commercialised. Sponsors (in offical speak “partners”) pay many millions for the right to be associated and to promote their own products.
It’s interesting to track the history of these companies. Kodak was previously a sponsor. There are still as many photographers as ever at the Olympics - probably more - but there is not so much film.3 Now the organisers provide ethernet cables that allow the photographers to connect their cameras directly to the Internet so iconic images can be uploaded and shared instantly. McDonald’s also used to be a sponsor, but now athletes need to venture out of the village to get their Big Macs. New sponsors who have taken their place include Alibaba, Intel and Samsung. But some traditions remain: if you’re thirsty inside the venues the only option is a Coke paid for using Visa.
This is a difficult balance for any sporting organisation. The companies who are prepared to pay the most to be sponsors are often not those administrators might pick. I remember watching the 1992 Benson & Hedges Cricket World Cup in NZ & Australia when I was a kid. I wonder if it will seem just as odd that Coca-Cola is such a prominent sponsor of the Olympics in another 20 years’ time?
Another significant source of revenue is media rights. American broadcaster NBC pay billions of dollars for the US television rights,4 and this is supplemented by smaller deals with broadcasters in each country - including SkyTV in New Zealand.
Broadcasters know the value of this content. As Brian Klaas put it so eloquently:
Countless viewers, myself included, will marvel at the extremes of human ability. Some will lay sprawled on their sofas, potato chip dust coating their reclined bellies, decrying an athlete as a failure for not sticking the landing. Other spectators will literally jump with joy when a human who happened to be born in the same country glides through the water one-hundredth of a second faster than a competitor born elsewhere.
4. Diplomacy
The Olympic Games are a melting pot.
Having people from pretty much every country on earth all in one place creates lots of opportunities for random encounters. This is accentuated by the fact that everybody (present company included) is walking around town with their country name on their t-shirt, so they’re more easily identified than they would be otherwise. It’s an unusual experience, for a kiwi sports fan at least, to be intersecting with athletes and fans from Indonesia, Ecuador and North Korea, all on the same day. It’s difficult to think of other sports where New Zealand and Hungary are fierce rivals, but look at the three gold medals won by Lisa Carrington in Paris - Hungary were second in two of those races and third in the other.
We all have the Olympics in common. There are 205 countries who competed in Paris and 90 who won medals. For the first time ever an athlete from the refugee team - who compete under the Olympic flag - won a bronze medal in women’s 75kg boxing. Olympic champions can come from nearly anywhere.
The five disciplines in the modern pentathlon were perfect training for a military officer in 1896. This was probably no accident, since many of the amateur athletes who competed in those first few Olympics were soldiers. At the London 1908 Olympics actual dueling pistols was an unofficial demonstration sport. At the Paris 1924 Olympics there was a dispute about the scoring of the fencing competition which led to real duels. The movie Chariots of Fire was all about the rivalry in the 100m race - I can’t help but think they focussed on the wrong story!
The Olympics were revived at a time when there was a lot of high diplomatic tension. After that first modern pentathlon in 1912, three of the next eight Olympic Games were cancelled due to World Wars. The politics of the Olympics has continued to be complicated. The USA and other countries (including New Zealand) boycotted the Moscow 1980 Olympics, and USSR and many other eastern-bloc countries boycotted the Los Angeles 1984 Olympics in response. It’s only 10 years since Vladimir Putin opened the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics. Now Russia is banned from competing entirely.5
However you feel about the relevance of the sports included in the Olympics you must admit it’s better than shooting at each other.
5. Sport
Last but not least, the Olympic Games are a pinnacle sporting event.
For the athletes who have trained for years to compete, this is the beginning and the end. The best in the world competing against the best in the world for glory and national pride. Countries striving for bragging rights by winning the most gold medals.
But, as we’ve discussed all through this series, not much of that stands up to scrutiny. The sports that make up the Olympic Games are a melange. For some sports the Olympics are the pinnacle but for many that’s not true. Including athletes from every country necessarily means many who would perform better are left out - the fourth fastest Kenyan long distance runner misses out entirely, only one boat from each country is allowed in the rowing and so on. And combining the results of all of the sports and disciplines into a single medal table only distracts from the remarkable individual performances.
Most other countries are as ambivalent about the results of the canoe sprint events as we in New Zealand are about the outcome of the handball competition or modern pentathlon. Everybody cares most about the particular thing they win. Maybe this is the beauty of the Olympics?
In Part 2 I outlined what a slimmed down event that was purely focussed on the ideals of “higher, faster, stronger” could look like. For the record, here is what the medal table would look like, counting just those events:
(I’ll have to leave it to you to speculate who would win the tug-o-war gold medal in these imagined games)
Note: Australia and South Korea do much better, while China and Japan do worse.
But, while that might be a better sporting event, it would be worse on all four other dimensions. That’s what makes the Olympic Games interesting. It’s not any one of these five things exclusively. It’s the intersection of all of them.
Gold Rush!
It’s really, really hard to win an Olympic gold medal. That’s not always self-evident. Especially when we mostly talk about the tally - seven golds, eight golds, nine golds, bunch!
There is a harmonious balance to the final Paris 2024 medal table - USA and China finish first equal with 40 golds each. USA wins on count back by virtue of more silver medals. They will both convince themselves they are the greatest sporting nation. As, no doubt, will Australia who finished in fourth place.
Hosts France apparently had a target of 20 gold medals. That was a significant upgrade from Tokyo 2020 where they won seven - the same number as NZ. In the end that proved too ambitious - they ended up with 16 gold medals (plus 26 silver medals, 22 bronze medals and 17 fourths). Still an amazing result - better than in any other Olympic Games since 1900, when they were also the hosts.
Italy won 40 medals, to place 9th on the medal table, but also claimed the title for the most fourth places, with 25. By comparison, We had only five fourth place finishes.6 On the other hand, Italy won 1.33 medals / 10,000 km2 compared to our 0.74 medals / 10,000 km2, so there is always a flattering sort order just waiting to be highlighted.7
And as for New Zealand, wow! 10 gold medals. By any measure, that’s remarkable. No doubt the team performance will be tagged as “the most successful ever”. But, as we’ve discussed, it’s a shame that the aggregate achievement trumps the significant individual efforts.
Before the start of the Games I proposed a couple of alternative ways of measuring the results. Let’s revisit those…
Recall, 195 kiwi athletes entered 102 events.8 I said a conversion rate of 12% overall (matching the performance from Los Angeles 1984) would be an excellent result. In the end it was 19.6%.
I tagged seven events as “likely” medals. Of those all but the men’s rugby sevens team won medals - five gold medals + Emma Twigg’s silver.
I tagged another 21 events as “possible” medals. Of those four won gold, four won silver and two won bronze. On top of that there were four fourths and three more fifths. None of them finished worse than eighth, except for Tom Walsh in the men’s shot put who finished 12th after being injured in his final.
So from that small selection of just 28 events combined there were 14 medals and 7 of them gold. I said a conversion rate of 50% would be an excellent result. So spot on! I doubt the most optimistic fan would have assumed 50% of those would be gold. I certainly didn’t.9
But there were medals in other events too. We shouldn’t talk about “surprise” medals - as that overlooks that the athletes who delivered those performances have been planning and working towards that outcome for years. The gold medals I didn’t predict were Finn Butcher in the men’s canoe slalom cross (possibly the most chaotic of summer Olympic events?), and Lydia Ko in the women’s golf (my bad - if you forced me to pick a “greatest kiwi sportsperson of all time” Lydia would be it, and her gold medal to complete her Olympic collection only reinforces that). There were also medals for the women’s pursuit team in the cycling and a couple of medals in the sailing that weren’t on my list. But of course these athletes themselves had high expectations. I was at the velodrome in Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines to see the women collect their silver medal. Immediately after their race the look on their face suggested unfinished business. That’s a good sign for the future.
In total 42 of the 195 kiwi athletes selected won medals. It would be fascinating to know how that percentage compares to other teams - but sadly I don’t have that data. I don’t believe any of the kiwi athletes were especially weighed down by the fact they come from a big but lightly populated country.
To close the loop on the “woke madness” of selecting a team consisting of nearly equal numbers of men and women - the medal count by gender was:
Women: 8 golds, 5 silver, 2 1/2 bronze
Men: 2 golds, 2 silver, 1/2 bronze
(the 1/2 was the bronze won by the mixed team in the sailing)
Lydia, Erica, Lisa, Alicia, Alena and Ellesse. Kerri, Maddi and Ally … I’m not a data scientist but I think I might be onto some patterns here! The 98 men in the team have provided the New Zealand Olympic Committee with an obvious way to slash their cost base by half for the next games in Los Angeles 2028.
Grenada topped our favourite “per capita” table, after picking up a couple of bronze medals in the athletics, including in the decathlon. We finished fourth behind Dominica (not to be confused with the Dominican Republic) with one gold and Saint Lucia with a gold and a silver.
If we further filter these tables to include only countries who won more than two medals, we end up on top, along with a telling list of western countries who all also invest significantly in winning Olympic medals - Netherlands, Ireland (who we pipped for the “team of five million” title), Norway, Hungary (who must be stung by our sweep in the women’s kayaking events), Sweden, Canada and our old rivals Australia. That seems to be the formula.
The title of “punching most above their second derivative weight” should go to Georgia in my opinion - seven medals including three gold, in boxing, judo, weightlifting and wrestling. I wonder what their high performance sports budget is?
Twenty medals overall is the same number we won in Tokyo 2020, when many predicted it was a high tide mark. How would a New Zealand team in the future possibly beat this result, if that’s the goal? Georgia’s performance holds the key, I think. We’d need to continue to win medals in our traditional “sitting down” events - rowing, kayaking, sailing and cycling + maybe an equestrian medal every now and then. And, we’d need to find a bunch of new “soft spots” (to borrow Dylan Clever’s perfect expression) in the Olympic schedule. If we want to dominate the per capita medal table, there is no point in going long on sports like handball, volleyball or waterpolo, because there are only two gold medals available in each of those. Sports like fencing, judo, taekwondo and wrestling all have the nice balance of being rich with multiple medal opportunities (thanks mostly to weight classes) without being quite as competitive as swimming or athletics. With enough investment and focus maybe we could win a bunch of “sweaty cuddling” medals. But would we care?
Of course, that shouldn’t be the goal. It’s an irrelevant ambition. The point of the Olympic Games is to create an opportunity for our best athletes, in whatever random sport they compete in, to demonstrate their potential. When they do it’s inspiring. Sometimes even when they don’t, it’s still inspiring. A much better measure of success will be turning up to Los Angeles in four years time with more than 28 medal prospects. What would that take?
Inspiration is rolled out as the justification for investment in this sort of thing. But inspiration, by itself, isn’t worth anything. It’s a means to an end. We have to be inspired to do something. I’ve found sporting administrators often take a narrow lens on this - they imply that sporting performances like we’ve all witnessed over the last fortnight inspire us to our own sporting greatness, or at least to be more physically active. The data on that is pretty skinny, if we’re honest - any measurable effect is short lived. However, just like Paris, excellence has many avenues. We can all be inspired by seeing other people achieve excellence in their own area, and then apply that to our own things. That might be science or design or business or politics or poetry or classical music or table tennis. Or running a specific distance faster than anybody else can. I’m not sure it matters. Ask yourself what it takes to be world class and then try to meet and exceed that standard.
The lesson of the Olympics is: Be excellent.
When a small number of people do this then the aggregate results we get to celebrate together can be substantial.
This is the seventh and final instalment in a series:
Ou est Pierre?
This is a pattern mirrored by triathlon when that was added to the programme at the Sydney 2000 Olympics - the so-called “Olympic Distance” triathlon combines a 1500m swim (the longest distance raced in the pool) with a 40km ride (the distance of the time trial on the road) and finally a 10km run (the longest distance raced on the track).
The IOC clearly doesn’t buy the argument there are eight.
The Paris 1924 Olympics were the first time more than 1,000 journalists attended. That number has increased significantly, evidenced by how much of the grandstand space is reserved for them.
According to Wikipedia $4.38 billion for the 2012, 2016 + 2020 games, which was extended by a further $7.75 billion for the 2024 and 2032 games. On average that’s just under $2.5 billion per Olympiad.
A small number of Russian and Belarusian athletes do compete under the AIN banner.
It could have been more - in both men’s single sculls at the rowing and men’s omnium on the velodrome we were sitting in fourth place only to fade to fifth just prior to the finish.
By comparison with some other similar sized countries: Japan won 1.19 medals / 10,000 km2, Romania won 0.34 medals / 10,000 km2 (maybe more pending gymnastics protests) and, Great Britain were head of the pack with 2.68 medals / 10,000 km2!
An increase from the 101 reported, as Lulu Sun was a last minute addition to the women’s singles draw in the tennis
40% of the medals won by NZ athletes were gold. Only Uzbekistan with 47% did better than that
I’ve thoroughly enjoyed your Olympic posts, Rowan. Thanks for them all.
Rowan, these 7 articles have been so delightful & meaningful to read, especially that I spent so much time in the stands, in the vans, on the trains and in NZ House with you & Emily. And all our other friends & supporters. Your conversations and writing has added a tonne more depth to the whole experience.
Now, it’s time to go to Barcelona and revel in our ETNZ America’s Cup regatta.