Is it woke to win gold medals? 🥇
Top Three @ The Paris 2024 Olympics
21st July, 2024 - Part 1
This is the first instalment in a series of indeterminate length:
Is it woke to win gold medals?
More coming soon!
It’s nearly time for Paris 2024, the Games of the XXXIII Olympiad (or Jeux de la XXXIIIe Olympiade).
An Olympiad is just a fancy Greek word, meaning “a period of four years”. Awkwardly, it’s only been three years since Tokyo 2020, which were delayed 12 months due to COVID-19 and not actually held until 2021. With the benefit of hindsight organisers probably wish they’d chosen a less specific name. But swapping a "0" for a "1" is easier said than done when it comes to the Olympics. Despite that compressed cycle, starting next week the elite athletes of the world come together again in the French capital to compete for glory and precious metals. And, for those competing in Athletics, prize money for the first time ever.1
Including the Winter Olympics, the previous three Olympic host cities have all been in Asia (Pyeongchang, South Korea in 2018, Tokyo, Japan in 2021 and Beijing, China in 2022). For the first time since London 2012 the games are back in Europe. Anticipation is high for the third games to be hosted in Paris.2
Given I call this Substack Top Three, it shouldn’t surprise anybody that I’m going to pause the contrarian tech startup commentary temporarily over the next couple of weeks to focus on some contrarian Olympics commentary instead.
I’m going to great distances to do this. I’m en route. Just like Lisa Carrington, this will be the fourth Olympics I’ve attended in person.3 Between us we have won six Olympic medals, five of them gold. You could say three medals per capita! I’m sure I speak for her too when I say that we’re both looking forward to adding to that medal tally in the coming weeks. I’ll write a lot more about per capita performances during that time, don’t worry. But for now, let’s start with a look at the NZ Team selected to compete not just attend …4
NZ Team for Paris 2024 Olympics
There has been some controversy about those who were selected and those who weren’t. It’s been a busy time for the Sports Tribunal. The key take-away from my perspective is: don’t volunteer to be a selector - it’s a hiding to nothing. The New Zealand Olympic Committee has once again taken heat over their high standards. My view on that, for what it’s worth is: high performance sport isn’t a human right. But maybe I’d think differently about that if I were an elite athlete ranked just outside the top 16 in the world?
However, now the legal proceedings are completed there are just 195 New Zealand athletes selected to represent us all (0.0037% of our team-of-five-million). The media headlines this week focussed on the nearly exactly equal split of men and woman in the team.5
As Radio New Zealand reported:
The team is close to gender equal, made up of 98 males and 97 females.
And:
The team members come from a wide range of cultural backgrounds, including athletes with Samoan, Tongan, French, Australian, Fijian, Chinese, Korean, Dutch, Indian, South African and American heritage. Māori athletes make up 17.4 percent of the team (34 athletes).
No huge surprises, but that flushed out some unhinged comments on a (now deleted) Facebook post, which compared the current 50/50 gender split to the last time the Olympics were held in Paris, 100 years ago in 1924, when the NZ team was 100% men:
“DEI bullshit”
And:
“Woke madness”
And:
“Clearly a selection on quota rather than on merit - expect to see the medal tally plummet”
I mean, never read the comments. But, I dunno. At the Tokyo Olympics, New Zealand athletes won 7 gold medals, and 6 of those were won by women. Clearly punching above their weight. If anything, that would suggest the team should be more unbalanced.
Is it woke to win gold medals?
Maybe it is?
It’s also a bit of a nonsense to count athletes, as these numbers are skewed by team sports. This time around only the men’s hockey team have qualified, neither of the men’s or women’s basketball teams have qualified, but both men’s and woman’s football teams have qualified. Meanwhile, unlike in Tokyo where both rowing eights won medals (the men a gold and the woman a close-run silver), this time around we will focus on athletes rowing backwards in boats containing just one, two or four people, rather than nine.6 If any of those team qualifications had flipped the other way then the mix of genders would be quite different.
The important statistic is that New Zealand athletes will compete in 101 different medal events (out of the 329 on offer). It’s the conversion rate on that denominator that we should really pay attention to.7 I’ll report back.
This is how the team is split between the 23 sports:
This begs a great trivia question: name the nine sports that we won’t compete in?
Remarkably, in Tokyo New Zealand athletes won medals in 11 different sports, including in tennis (for the first time since 1912, when Tony Wilding won bronze competing for “Australasia”) and gymnastics (for the first time ever).8 While that overall result is unlikely to be repeated in 2024, the wide spread of sports covered by the team in Paris bodes well for at least one medal in a sport that none of us were expecting. Do you remember Natalie Rooney, our very first medalist at the Rio 2016 Olympics? No, you probably don’t. For reasons I’ll explore in the next post, her performance hasn’t stuck in the public consciousness as much as others. I’ll talk about some of the reasons for that, and a lot more about the sports that do (and don’t) make it into the Olympics programme, in the next post.
For now though, we wish the whole team well. They are all freaks, completely unlike you and me. Some of them will be stoked to be there, and excited to compete at the pinnacle of their chosen sport. Others will have dreams of medals dashed soon. But a select few might win and in the process etch themselves into a proud Olympic history.
The great thing is we don’t know yet which are which. That’s why we watch.
Que les jeux commencent!
Photo by Solen Feyissa on Unsplash
Strictly speaking, it’s only two years since the last Olympics, with Beijing hosting the Winter Olympics in 2022. However, unless you’re Norwegian, these summer games are normally what sports fans mean when they say “Olympics”. It’s like the difference between The Open and The US Open in golf!
London was the first three-peat host in 2012, and Los Angeles will join them when they host the next games in 2028.
For me Sydney 2000, Rio 2016, Pyeongchang 2018 and now, CrowdStrike permitting, Paris 2024.
At the Olympics, gender is strictly binary.
For reasons I can’t explain the ninth member of the eight, the cox, isn’t counted in the event name.
In Tokyo New Zealand athletes competed in 92 events, and won medals in 22% of them, and gold in 8% of them. If the current team match that rate it will be our most successful Olympics ever, but don’t hold your breath. Even a 10% conversion rate (meaning 10 medals) will be a solid return.
Three years later and we have another doubles team who are possible medalists.