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Comment by TelmoMenezes | Hacker News Reader

> Stepping back a bit, there's no reason that anybody should be getting a salary simply because they are one of the very best at their chosen sport.

Indeed. They should be getting a salary because they provide the extremely rare talent (developed through incredible effort and dedication) that makes the multi-billion dollar business that is the Olympics possible to begin with.

The reason they do not get it is very similar to what you see in other fields like science and art: because the sociopaths that run our society know very well how to take advantage of the love that talented people have for their respective fields.

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The extremely rare talent is not what makes the Olympics possible. The marketing machine (which is run by the executives) are what make it possible.

The top 100 athletes in every sport could sit out the Olympics, and the TV ratings and corporate sponsorship would take only a slight dip.

Well, that's happening in golf this year so we'll see how it goes.

Got any links about that? I haven't heard anything.

That is all fine and dandy, except that what really makes the Olympics-as-media-circus possible is tax payer money.

Given that it is not a free market operation to being with, but rather a money extraction operation based on political pull, we could do without the supply and demand lessons.

It would be interesting to ask the tax payers if they think that executives deserve to take home all of their money while the athletes that they actually enjoy watching get none of it.

The IOC's revenue isn't tax revenue, it's sponsorship revenue[1] Same goes for Team US: as the article itself points out, one of the reasons the US Olympic athletes are so poor is because unlike many other countries the US teams' budget isn't topped up by the tax payer (but is topped up by a bunch of sponsorship salespeople who bring in more money than they get paid but expect close-to-market compensation in return). And yes, like any free market organization, the management and the salespeople are better compensated than the people who are just really, really glad to be there.

If everyone on the IOC executive worked for free without any access to their expense accounts there still would be barely anything left for each individual athlete just for competing, especially if like Team USA their local government wasn't prepared to subsidise things either. So it's really nothing to do with monopoly power either. Olympic athletes are poorly compensated because there are an awful lot of them, and most of them only get a few minutes (sometimes only a few seconds) exposure at the highest level per decade in front of audiences that enjoy watching other sports on a weekly basis

As for the athletes people enjoy watching well enough to know their name and buy their preferred hair gel, the free market means they're compensated pretty well for their brand in individual sponsorship deals. Trouble is, there aren't many Olympians that are household names, especially the ones that really need the money.

[1]sure, local taxpayers often end up underwriting an Olympics after the planners overspend on infrastructure, but that's nothing to do with what goes into the IOC president's expense account, or indeed what the athletes get

but that's nothing to do with what goes into the IOC president's expense account

It does actually, unfortunately: https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2016/may/11/tokyo-olympic-...

That's the story of a massive bribe [allegedly] paid to an individual rather than the source of the IOC's funding though. It was never likely to be directed to the part of the Olympic movement that most needed it.

Actually, I suspect that part of the justification for the IOC executives' lavish officially-sanctioned, sponsorship-funded expense accounts is to limit the ability of bidding nations to curry favour with less obviously corrupt "free hospitality" arrangements that apparently were common in the 90s. (You're less likely to feel obliged towards someone for the offer of free flights and a five star hotel for your fact finding mission if you could charge it to your Amex card anyway) Whether it actually works is another question...

Are you saying the high paid executives cannot be replaced themselves? That if you tried, the Olympics would be less successful?

The people watching make it possible. Stop watching and marketers might spend less or ratings might disappear or be counterfeit.

No, marketing machines need something to market; you can't sell pieces of shit to people no matter how many ads you run.

Over-estimating the power of marketing is a time-honored tradition among developers and engineers. Ironically, they also tend to view marketers as clods without any real skills. Weird divergence there. But I digress.

What is the marketing message of the Olympics? That the world's best athletes are competing against each other. If that is obviously and demonstrably not true, then the marketing fails. Contrary to popular belief, customers actually are not bad at sniffing out BS in their preferred products.

"The top 100 athletes in every sport could sit out the Olympics, and the TV ratings and corporate sponsorship would take only a slight dip."

Might not work. Remember the XFL? Arena football with lousy, underpaid players. Canceled after one season.

>They should be getting a salary because they provide the extremely rare talent

Supply and demand. The Olympics is the only place that cares about their rare talent. It's not like they can shop around for a better offer.

It's not an extremely rare talent. Virtually anyone can run/swim/play games. It's an arms race. Every one trains hard because others train hard.

None of them are inherently amazing. They just work a lot.

If no-one bothered training we'd still have an Olympics, it'd just be slower.

I've phrased this as, "Regardless of the increased salary in the NFL over the last 40 years, they're still only producing one super bowl winner every year. On a per team basis, production has actually gone down."

Yours is a perspective that effectively renders the term "talent" meaningless.

That's kind of the consensus modern psychology and trainers are coming to. Some kids just have a drive that others don't, and that is what determines how well they do.

The major difficulty with the idea of "natural talent" is that every time someone points to a skill/whatever and says, "this is natural talent" someone else finds a way to teach that skill. Here is one paper: http://talentdevelop.com/articles/ITROM.html

So if you trained hard enough you could run the 100m as fast as Bolt?

"Body shape" isn't what people usually mean by 'talent', and I doubt you define it that way either; but if you want to define talent to mean body shape, I will happily concede that talent is important.

> "Body shape" isn't what people usually mean by 'talent'

"Talent" is usually a catch-all for innate features distinct from trained features. ("Body shape" has both innate and trained elements.)

Merriam Webster defines talent as a special ability that allows someone to do something well. I agree with that definition. Usain Bolt is a naturally talented runner.

You said

>The major difficulty with the idea of "natural talent" is that every time someone points to a skill/whatever and says, "this is natural talent" someone else finds a way to teach that skill.

Can anyone be trained to run as fast as Bolt or would they have to be naturally talented in the first place to be trainable?

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