sigmaleph | (no subject)

I don't understand the way people react to the olympics

of course this is true in full generality about sporting events, but at least soccer fanaticism is a familiar puzzlement; i don't get it, but i already have a black box i can put it all in. the olympics have only happened a handful of times since i've been alive and paying attention

like, people on tumblr were talking about this nytimes tweet where their gold medal graph was skewed to make china's medals smaller. which, like, yeah, deceptive graph practices are bad, but also. why are people invested in the relative amount of medals countries have.

people at work were talking about how china has these training camps for kids so they can win more olympic medals and they were like... approving? like state investment in increasing this meaningless number is a good thing and our government is failing because often people who are good at sports find that they can't afford the time it takes to train or the money for transportation or etc.

and. why is that our problem. setting aside that on priors actually being selected as a child to go to a training school to be an olympic athlete probably involves horrible abuse and must be hell on the majority who fail if it is even kinder on the people who succeed. even assuming they are perfectly nice schools and the athletes have lovely or at least average-happiness childhoods followed by a chance at the Olympics... why is that the government's job? will getting more olympic medals improve the material conditions of anyone in the country? (other than whoever won the medal, who will probably be very happy about it)

people talk about how without state support, being an olympic athlete will be biased towards people who are already from wealthy families and don't need to have a real job (with some exceptions for popular sports where you can already have a career playing it professionally). sure. this is also true of everything else you might want to do full time that doesn't pay for itself, so why are we selecting this subset of hobbies as deserving of state sponsorship?