With gender parity being exactly 50/50 in these Olympics, the women of the U.S. won 65% of their gold medals, and also won a greater percentage of medals overall than the men did. Now it’s not like the American men did bad or anything, but clearly they are a step behind the women, and there’s a few reasons for this.
The first is Title IX: for those unaware, title IX ensures that men and women in the US have equal opportunity in all regards, including sports and athletics. Especially in collegiate sports, there are regulations that colleges must follow to make sure women are given the same opportunity as men, things such as giving out an equal number of scholarships, making sure practice times are equitable, etc… To my knowledge (correct me if I’m wrong), there are not many other countries where this is a thing. So the U.S. women receive much better training and have more opportunities for success compared to other countries, as more money is probably spent on men’s sports in these other countries and they don’t invest in women’s sports as heavily.
But that’s only part of the equation: because why exactly, if the men in the U.S. get the same training and opportunities as the women in the U.S., shouldn’t they be performing just as well? The simple answer as to why they aren’t is football (American football). Football is the number one most invested sport in the U.S., and is played almost exclusively by men. Colleges pour all their money and scholarships into football, which means in order to comply with Title IX, they have to make cuts to some other men’s programs, such as gymnastics, wrestling, volleyball, etc…
Why do you think U.S. women’s gymnastics has always been superior to men’s gymnastics? Well, because if you’re a male athlete in the U.S. and you want a scholarship, chances are you’re more likely to find one playing football, as opposed to gymnastics. Not to say you can’t find one for gymnastics, but it’s much harder. This isn’t the case for women however, as football is not a sport where they get scholarships.
For women’s sports, the funding is more well-rounded. Basketball may get a bit more, but other than that, I’d like to take a guess that the rest of the sports get roughly equal funding, not to mention there aren’t any sports with a significantly higher number of players. However, for men’s sports, football gets a large portion the money, and basketball also get a decent amount. This leaves other men’s sports that are typically in the Olympics in the dust. Not to mention, a football team has about 50-60 players, which eats up much more scholarships for men, and unfortunately, other sports are sacrificed for it.
This is just the culture of the US and it’s not going to change anytime soon. Football generates the most revenue, and so colleges aren’t going to have any incentive to cut funding for football programs. But they will have to keep making more and more cuts to other men’s sports, unless something systematically changes.
As far as I’m aware, in future Olympics, the US women will either keep doing better or remain about the same amount ahead of their competition, whereas the US men will continue to trend downwards and not be as dominant, because colleges and other athletic programs will invest way more into football (a non-Olympic sport) than they will into sports that are part of the Olympics.
Maybe I am mistaken, but I think most other countries don´t give athletic scholarships at all.
In a lot of other countries there is state-sponsored sport for elite athletes instead. In Italy, for example, career fencers compete on teams run by the police and the military and they get promotions in rank and pensions.
The Equestrian events started as ways to showcase the training of military horses. Prior to 1952, ONLY military members were allowed to compete in those events.
You’re not wrong. I also saw a lot of athletes from other countries showing their college pictures, in America.
Leon Marchand, for example, swims in the US and is on scholarship at Arizona State.
Julian Alfred runs at Texas, for that matte
Don’t have too when the best European and Caribbean athletes get deals to go study in the US and compete their too. Leon Marchand for example is swimming in Texas and I think least one of the Brits with him. That must be squeezing in the talent pool if you’re a teen whose times etc are compared with similar athletes across the globe
Other countries have sports academies though, which for all intent and purposes, very similar to top D1 atheletic training that American universities offer, but might start at a much younger age.
And there’s good reason why other countries don’t have athletic scholarships - studying is a full time job, training to be olympic level athlete is a full time job too. There’s no way to do both of them properly at the same time. From outside of US it looks like a socially accepted lie. Redditors from US who went to college if you’ve seen high level athletes there - how does that work in practice? Do they get a free pass eat the exams? Or they srudy something super easy which doesn’t require much time?
A huge amount of German athletes are in university during their active career. They just don’t get a scholarship, because university is free in Germany and University sports teams aren’t a big thing. Some even are in the Armed Forces, going to University and are Olympic athletes, all three at the same time. Because we do have a system where the Army finances specific army sports groups, where the athletes have to come to Army training now and again and otherwise are free to do what they like, but get an Army salary.
At the end of the day even Olympic athletes don’t actively train 15 hours a week. And when you are recovering between training sessions, you can sit around and play FIFA, like professional footballers do, or you can study, because you know you’ll need some skills when your sports career ends.
We really should.