LONDON – As Olympic mania swept the world in recent weeks, it transported the host country, Great Britain, to a rare display of public exultation. Indeed, the successes of “Team GB” produced an upsurge of patriotic rejoicing akin to victory in war. Britain finished third in the gold medal count, behind the United States and China, much larger countries, but ahead of Russia, which traditionally competes with America for first place.So, what is the secret of Olympic success? The acquisition of medals, precisely because it gives so much satisfaction, has become the object of scientific inquiry and national endeavor. Before the 2012 Games, the Financial Times combined four economic models to produce the following “consensus” prediction of gold medals (the actual results are in brackets): 1. United States, 39 (46); 2. China, 37 (38); 3. Great Britain, 24 (29); 4. Russia, 12 (24); 5. South Korea, 12 (13); and 6. Germany, 9 (11). The gold medal rankings and overall medal placement (gold, silver, and bronze) were correctly predicted in all cases.The most striking finding is that the medal count can be predicted with great accuracy from four key variables: population, GDP per capita, past performance, and host status. Everything else – different training structures, better equipment, and so forth – is pretty much noise.The impact of population and GDP is obvious: A large population increases the chance that a country will have athletes with the natural talent to win medals, and a high GDP means that it will have the money to invest in the infrastructure and training needed to develop medal-winning athletes.Past performance is also important: the visibility and prestige of a sport increases after Olympic success, as does funding. Medals attract money; failure results in cuts.Finally, the “home advantage” includes not just the benefit of morale and the opportunity to train in the actual Olympic venues, but also the funding boost that host status brings. In 2004, British athletes received £70 million ($110 million). By 2008, after London was awarded the 2012 Games, the total was £245 million, and stood at £264 million this year. Over the past ten Olympics, the host country has won 54% more medals on average than when it was not the host. Hosting the Olympics boosts performance before the hosted Games, and has effects that outlast them.Some sports are more sensitive to income and host-nation effects than others. Equestrianism, sailing, cycling, and swimming, for example, are far more expensive than running, and this reduces the participation of low-income countries. It is almost impossible for some countries to produce medal-winning athletes in some sports – Ethiopia has only one swimming pool per six million people.Sometimes, poor countries are priced out of a sport. India was historically strong at field hockey, winning almost all of the gold medals between 1928 and 1968, but, since the Games switched from grass to expensive synthetic turf, the Indians have won just one field hockey medal. Some of the sports at which Britain has done particularly well, like cycling and rowing, are most highly influenced by income and host effects.Brazil can therefore expect to improve considerably on its modest haul (15 medals) and 21st-place finish when it hosts the 2016 Games. As for the others, the formula for success is fairly simple: select your potentially winning sports, pick the potential medalists in those sports, pour money into them, and stick with both the sports and the players until the medals roll in. The funding can be corporate sponsorship (as in the United States), state money (as in China), or a mixture of National Lottery and state money (as in the United Kingdom).Two questions arise. First, why should a country concentrate on accumulating trophies at the expense of other desirable goods? And, second, can the formula for “picking winners” in sports be replicated for competitive success in international trade?The answer to the first is not obvious. An economist would probably argue that money spent on education, housing, and health care brings more “welfare” than money spent in the quest for medals. When all is said and done, sports is entertainment; the others are necessities.But that argument ignores the effect of sporting success on national morale, an intangible factor in a country’s success in other, more “serious,” spheres of endeavor. A country that can succeed in one sphere of peaceful competition is encouraged to feel that it can do well in others.One can treat this claim with a certain degree of skepticism – after all, the 2004 Athens Olympics failed to produce a Greek economic miracle. But it does lead to the second question: Can the methods that produce Olympic winners be applied elsewhere?Nothing is more discredited in Anglo-American economics than the policy of “picking winners.” The consensus has been that it inevitably leads to the state “backing losers.” Economic success, on this view, is best left to the unfettered play of market forces.This philosophy has been heavily jolted by two inconvenient facts: the financial collapse of 2007-2008 and the experience of countries like Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Germany, and even the US, where economic success depended heavily on sustained government investment of the kind that has produced Olympic medals. As in sports, so in economic life: government commitment can start a virtuous circle of success, while government neglect can trigger a vicious circle of decline.Nevertheless, the popular hunger for sporting success, and the celebratory outpouring that it evokes, is bound to provoke some disquiet. It seems to mark humanity’s retreat into infantilism. But if the douceur of sports can channel aggressive passions into benign, if trivial pursuits, why should we deny our star performers their heroic stature?Robert Skidelsky, Professor Emeritus of Political Economy at Warwick University and a fellow of the British Academy in both history and economics, is a working member of the British House of Lords. The author of a seminal three-volume biography of John Maynard Keynes, he began his political career in the Labour party, before helping to found the short-lived Social Democratic Party and eventually becoming the Conservative Party’s spokesman for Treasury affairs in the House of Lords. He was forced out of the Conservative Party for his opposition to NATO’s intervention in Kosovo in 1999. Copyright: Project Syndicate.org
