Americans are bad at sports
Polite Notice (or rather, ‘Warning’ if you want me to use the American terminology): Friday posts are not serious. The problem is just that this Friday, I am making fun of Americans and since they have all the guns and no sense of irony, I think it is necessary to emphasise this. I am just kidding, please don’t shoot me.
What is it with Americans that they are so rubbish at sports? They play football with their hands, cricket with a round bat and snooker on a smaller table with fewer balls? It’s as if they had to take every beautiful game the British invented, change the rules, and ruin it in the process. And then they are the only ones playing these stupid games and proclaim themselves world champions…
What is going on there? Is it Americans trying to make a point that they have left the Empire? Then why are they pretty much the only country in the world still using the Imperial System of weights and measures?
I am sorry, but over the next four weeks, I will be reminded every day that Americans are bad at sports and bad at statistics, but still pretend to be the best at both. And the reason for that is that today, the Olympics start in Paris. For the next four weeks, I will come across the medal table on TV and in newspapers on a daily basis and it always will show the US on top of the rankings.
American athletes will win the most medals and the most gold medals and that will put them on top. And Americans will once again think they are the greatest spots nation in the world, conveniently ignoring the fact that they are a United States of America and have 333 million inhabitants while Europe consists of dozens of independent countries, each with much fewer inhabitants.
What if the EU would finally move towards becoming the United States of Europe? This is not some delusion, but the stated purpose of the EU and expressly stated in Article 1 of the Treaty of Lisbon: “This Treaty marks a new stage in the process of creating an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe”.
This is also something that the Brits never really understood. The EU is not a free trade zone, it is a path towards the United States of Europe. But that is a story for another time.
Back to the Americans.
It is in my view quite easy to win lots of medals if you have hundreds of millions of people with all their skills and a ton of money to support them. The Americans being on top of the medals table is like the 200-pound gorilla picking on the juveniles in his group.
But what happens when we level the playing field and compare the medal haul of the Americans at the Olympics with the medal haul of a United States of Europe?
I went to the most reliable source on the internet (i.e. Wikipedia) and looked up the all-time medals table. Then I calculated the number medals, the member states of the current EU have won in the past and compare that to the US. The results are shown below.
Number of medals won by the US vs. Europe
Source: Wikipedia
The United States of Europe won 60% more gold medals than Americans in the Summer Olympics and more than twice as many medals in total. For fun, I also calculated the number of medals if the UK would eventually become a member of the United States of Europe (don’t worry, they’ll come around eventually…).
One may say that this is not fair because the European medal count includes also former communist countries with their state-sponsored doping programmes. As if the Americans are always clean (Wikipedia has 318 separate pages with prominent athletes involved in doping cases). But even if I subtract the medals of former communist states as well as the medals of former East Germany, European have still won as many gold medals, and about one third more medals in total at Summer Olympics than Americans. And don’t get me started about the Winter Olympics.
I can already hear American readers complain that Europe has more people than the US. So, let’s look at the number of medals per million inhabitants.
Number of medals won per million inhabitants by the US vs. Europe
Source: Wikipedia
Same picture. European are just massively better at sports than Americans in every way imaginable.
And we show them every other year. Because every two years, the golfers participate in the Ryder Cup where an American team plays a European team. And since 1979 when the British team was expanded to a pan-European team, the Americans have won nine times compared to the Europeans’ thirteen victories.
So, if Americans could please stop claiming they are the greatest sports nation on Earth and stop shouting “USA! USA! USA!” all the time, that would be much appreciated. Thank you.
I am American but I upvoted your post to show my open mindedness ;)
I like to rile up my fellow countrymen by arguing that American sports are the most socialist in the world: They're state-supported (they issue bonds to build all the stadia, public schools/universities are taxpayer-supported farm clubs), and then the owners demand "drafts" to keep things "fairly distributed", and the organizing leagues maintain tax-free status http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joschka-yoshi-tryba/americans-are-already-soc_b_8107066.html . Compare that to Man United or Formula 1 in Europe, where sports remain rapaciously capitialisic https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/09/us-europe-soccer-football/598012/ . And yes, I'll keep saying "sports" not "sport" because there are more than one of them ;-)
Also, there's some delicious irony in that the "USA! USA! USA!" chant only arose at the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid New York, when the US ice hockey team beat the Soviet Union (who'd won five of the six previous gold medals) in an shocking upset that caught the crowd so by surprise they likely couldn't come up with anything more clever on the spot. I was 15 at the time, and recall that it came at the nadir of American malaise (peak of the Cold War, Second Oil Crisis, Iran Hostage Crisis, Stagflation, manufacturing decline, etc.), so that victory was the Miracle of Bern, 1966 World Cup, and The Greatest Try all rolled into one. When Americans use that chant, they're really re-living the emotions of that very moment. I'll reserve judgement on European soccer chants, which all sound like "yoooo, yo yo yo yo yo, yoooo" repeated non-stop for 90 minutes ;-)
Could your numbers be skewed by the fact that the Olympics were a European invention biased toward European events routinely practiced by priviliged noblemen (the early ones even had medals for art); In the first half-century of the modern games, the US didn't exactly have Prussian military riding academies for dressage and eventing, nor dozens of Kings, Queens, Jacks, and Aces already tuned up for things such as fencing who had nothing but time in which to train. At that time, America was still a largely agrarian society playing poor man's games such as baseball and basketball if any at all. Their participation was also generally decidedly light-touch (Ivy League rich kids mostly), as travel distances were long, and the general view of "the Olympic movement" was probably on par with that (still baffling to me) British scepticism over "The United States of Europe", with limited coordinated government sponsorship/support.
Also, did you re-include Jim Thorpe's medals? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Thorpe#Olympic_awards_reinstated .
Anyway, great thought-provoking piece as usual ... enjoy your nice four-week (!) European summer vacation whilst the Americans take two max and tack on another extra percentage point or two of annual GDP ;-)