The Olympic Buoy

We all know about the direct effect hosting the Olympic Games has on city and national economies. They're well-studied, and generally miserable propositions for citizens of the host nation, and often the host city as well. What are less discussed are the ripple effects that the games have on what sports young, talented athletes participate in.

There are a few different arguments you can make regarding these effects, which vary in directness of cause and play against national and local policies toward sports. First and foremost is what I like to refer to as the "Olympic Buoy".

The Olympic Buoy describes how certain sports, because of their prominence in the Olympics, are artificially propped up in popularity, prestige, and sponsorship. Were the games to disappear overnight, one would expect popular participation in the sport to plummet. This is especially true of sports where the Olympics are far and away the only time a sport is watched by any number of people, and other national and international competitions are largely ignored. Sports that have strong independent championships and broad participant bases are raised in prominence less powerfully than ones truly dependent on the Games for exposure. There are a number of examples, but a few prominent ones include gymnastics and swimming, in the Summer Games, and curling in the Winter games. Sports such as basketball, soccer and tennis are the least buoyed, with the Games being simply another competition for many top-tier athletes.

Regretfully, there are not reliable statistics to prove this point thoroughly. Numbers on sport participation over time are understandably unclear. What we do know is that in the 1960s there were about 7000 gymnasts participating in competitions, while today USA Gymnastics claims 110,000 members. For a sport with comparatively high cost for amateur participation, that amounts to explosive growth. To compare, the US population rose from about 194 million to about 317 million.
So the Olympics happen to correlate with high growth rates for sports that feature them as the pinnacle of competition.

While the hard evidence is lacking, there's plenty of good reason to believe that the Olympics make sports that would otherwise be marginally popular far more so. The Games act as a massive amount of free-ish publicity for participants and fans of sports that otherwise merit little more than a brief mention in the hometown newspaper of athletes. Does anyone really think there would be nearly as many people outside of Canada curling were the games non-existent?

What makes matters worse is the fact that the games are based around public funding. We see a transfer of the burden for promoting particular sports from the participants and fans to the public at large, specifically state and local taxpayers in host cities. We can debate the merit of hosting the games, but this transfer of marketing burden makes minimal sense to anyone except those in the sports world.

Are there other ripple effects that are worth discussing? What about the distortions these roundabout subsidies have on the spectrum of athletes? This question deserves far more study, and I'd love to see any research that comments on it. It would make sense that this massive amount of marginally free publicity would encourage athletes who show promise in multiple sports to choose sports with the Olympics as their greatest arena over those without it. Even at the amateur level, the Games could well encourage parents to enroll their kids in sports with strong Olympic followings over those without them, say, swimming over cycling, where the Tour de France is the sport's preeminent event, but has coverage that pales in comparison to most Olympic sports. Put simply, the Olympics seem likely to distort the hierarchy of which sports people play and follow worldwide, all on the backs of taxpayers of host cities. This is the essence of what I like to refer to as "The Olympic Buoy"