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.
You should also consider that other countries - specifically China, which has been the other top country in the last 30 years- have government sponsored Olympic training programs. They literally go out to schools and find kids who have potential for olympic sports and then send them to national training programs. The US doesnt give a shit about the majority of olympic sports and has no HS clubs or programs for them so there is zero exposure to most. Like handball? no one has even heard of this in the US
I mean … is this news to anyone? Of course Title IX is the reason? Of course we don’t invest in association football for men because we invest in American football more?
None of this is exactly groundbreaking or unknown
Brother I’m like 80% sure it’s just the fact that U.S. women get more resources and athletes than other countries’ female athletics programs lol
He’s right, but not for the exact reasons he’s listed, or at least in not so many words.
Title XI has made it so the sports we primarily associate with the Olympics tend to become female-dominated in the NCAA (for the most part) because there is no female equivalent to American Football. Colleges have to offer the same number of scholarships to guys as they do girls, so those extra 80 football scholarships turn into women’s volleyball, swimming, gymnastics, etc…
His point about the men underperforming isn’t really accurate though, so ignore that part lmao
XI = 11. IX = 9.
The US has the highest GDP in the world and big sports culture in general. The women definitely get more resources by far, but the men in theory are getting more resources as well. But those resources and investments are going more towards football, and not Olympic sports. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, it’s just what it is.
I think what you’re missing is that resources don’t cause exponential growth. Resources cannot overcome the differences between the Canadian and Moroccan soccer teams, because despite having less money, the Moroccans are simply better at soccer.
The idea that the American obsession with Football is holding them back in other sports doesn’t really make sense, because they dominate Track, Swimming, Basketball and other categories every year.
U.S women having more resources comes more from many parts of the rest of the world valuing female athletics muuuuch lower than male athletics. It’s not just money, it’s the culture of encouraging sport.
Men are not discouraged from athletics anywhere in the world, therefore if a man or a group of men are dedicated and passionate enough, they will succeed in finding a stage to perform on. The same cannot be said for women across the world.
Moroccans are not better at soccer because they are simply born more skilled than Canadians. the team is better because it’s the most popular sport in Morocco and has more money invested into it as compared to other sports for that country so most of the athletic latent is funneled into soccer.
It’s not about how much resource is invested into soccer in x country compared to y country. it’s about how much of the resources in any given country is going toward soccer compared to other sports.
Maybe I am mistaken, but I think most other countries don´t give athletic scholarships at all.
We really should.
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.
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.
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.
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
The “under-performance” of US men have little to with american football. It’s just that US women have had the comparative advantage far larger vs rest of the world women who they compete against due to title IX. US women are still reaping the benefits from 20-30 years ago but that advantage is eroding. This “male athlete in the U.S. going for football instead of gymnastics” is BS. No 320lb football player would excel in gymnastics and likewise, you don’t need some aerialists or 5’4" guy at football.
a 320 Pound Linemen “could” excel at Wrestling or Weightlifting, a WR,Safety or DB could excel at many track events. Us football has a variety of body types who make up a team,many of these guys who are excellent collegiate football player could excel at certain Olympic sports if they lived in a world where Usa gridiron football had never been invented.
But my point is if the funding for sports were more well-balanced, less athletes would be trained to be a 320 pound football player in the first place. Genetics do play a part in it, but so does training. They’d be trained differently from a younger age to play a different sport.
Cultural interest has a LOT more to do with youth sport participation and training than NCAA programs. Outside of small subset of parents with probably unhealthy mindsets, kids don’t start playing a sport to get a college scholarship. They start because they’ve been exposed to it and it’s fun and there are opportunities to play and grow.
Football is the top money maker/spender at the NCAA level BECAUSE it is so popular across the country. It’s not popular across the country because colleges have decided that’s the sport that should take up all the scholarships.
I do agree with this, but the fact that there are scholarships for some sports and not for others means that once young athletes reach the college level, they’re more likely than not to stop playing their sport, or at least take it less seriously.
I did bowling in high school, again because it was something that I enjoyed and I was passionate about. Both boys and girls who were interested in bowling did it, and they had similar levels of competition. But by the time we all reached college, most boys were done with it, as there’s no bowling scholarships for boys. But girls got scholarships and so their careers continued and they continued to develop.
One of the reasons why female athletes perform better in the medal table is that women’s sports are not competitive enough worldwide, and many economically underdeveloped countries cannot even afford to develop women’s sports. But men’s sports are much more competitive.
Depends on the event. There are a ton of well performing female athletes in track from poor African and relatively poor carribean nations. Of course, swimming is something a poor nation is not going to have success in for obvious reasons.
That is not “sport”, that is “genetics”.
“Ethiopian highlands” people are specially build for long distance running. So is small parts of western africa, all the US, Jamaican sprinters have traces to a small region in west africa.
Then the people around caucasian mountains for strend sports such as weightlifting, boxing and wrestling. Since those are mostly poor countries, only men comes from those region to olympic level.
It’s both. These people aren’t just plucked from villages and sent to the Olympics. They train and travel all over the world to compete in qualifying events in the three years before every Olympics. A random 16-30 year old Ethiopian would still get destroyed in a 15k in a sub-national championship race with only white athletes. But yes, at the very top of the elite level genetics matter
Well you don’t exactly need a huge program to be built up to run in a circle or long distance. That’s why those poorer African/Caribbean nations can perform so well in track events.
I agree. A lot of countries aren’t even sending girls to school, so they’re definitely not investing much in girls/women’s sports.
“Only 49 per cent of countries have achieved gender parity in primary education. At the secondary level, the gap widens: 42 per cent of countries have achieved gender parity in lower secondary education, and 24 per cent in upper secondary education.”
Yep, was going to post the same and found your point.
Its a combination of poverty and conservatism, but mostly poverty.
Many ignore how important is childhood nutrition for one to become a elite world-class athlete. There are like of Pele that is pure genius, but for majority its not. World class athletes are build from the childhood.
So probability of one come up is very rare and take long time. In such environment, boys tend to get more opportunity to continue while the threshold for girls are much higher.
But the US’s policy has created investment in women’s athletics so it bucks the trend and helps them win… Which is what the OP is saying. The US also used to give less resources to women
The part of the post explaining why American women are overperforming is correct, the problem is the part of the post about men underperforming because of American football. There is no proof that American men are underperforming, just that American women get more gold in a field that is slightly less competitive because not as many countries invest in their women yet.
The post is just pointing out that women’s Olympic sports get more funding than men’s due to title IX. The relative dominance of US women is a combination of lower competition and higher funding and top male athletes choosing lucrative non-Olympic sports.
Football/soccer is the main example
Usa women dominated because the rest of the world literally didn’t care.
Now the interest is growing in Europe but there is still a long way to go, all women matches (except the ones involving France) were like with 80% empty stadium, there were a lot more people watching the men U23 tournament…
As a Canadian you can see it with us as well. Look at how well our Canadian women have done relative to our men. It’s not like we’re short on men’s players either, soccer is super popular here. You can look to the winter Olympics as well and how the men’s tournament goes for hockey relative to the women. There are several countries who really have a chance to win for the men but for the women it’s Canada and the US. That’s it. Since the introduction of women’s ice hockey in 98 Canada and the US have won gold and silver every time except once when Sweden won silver in 06. Everyone else is playing for bronze on the women’s side.
It’s just a really tremendous commentary on how well women are treated in the United States from a sports perspective.
Feels like a lot of people lose sight of that.
American women interested in sport are extremely fortunate ladies.
I think this again, goes to my point. Men in the US are offered less scholarships and training in other sports like gymnastics, volleyball, wrestling, etc… that they don’t get the extra push to be the best in the world at what they do, hence why the playing field is more level in men’s sports.
Remember there has to be a 50/50 split between male and female scholarships and football takes up 85 scholarships alone so every male sport they had they need to add like two women’s sports. That’s the main drive in my opinion.
I don’t agree with this tbh. Yes the scholarship system help the women but elite men will never have an issue finding scholarships or chances to compete so the US male athletes are as good as they’ll be even if you got rid of college football.
What makes the women stronger comparatively than the men is that the so many other countries can’t fund elite athletes in women’s events but will find and fund the elite athletes in male events. Poorer countries only have so many resources so they predictably dedicate them to male sports first and also male athletes are normally able to better self fund themselves so they can create athletes that can compete with the US in male events but not in the female events.
The only reason that the US is dominant in the Olympics is because of their financial muscle. This is funded by the economy and the college system and is a great achievement for the US. If every other country suddenly was able to fund their female athletes at the same levels that they fund their male athletes then the US would be less dominant in female events and it would drop down to around the same levels as the men’s dominance. It’s not football taking scholarships away from the men it’s that women in other countries can’t afford to be as good as their male athletes and that’s before we talk about countries where women are prohibited or encouraged not to take part in sport so they have less athletes.
It’s not about scholarships
You’re missing out on the fact that a lot of men play team sports because it’s an easier road to success without needing to be the fastest, the strongest, etc.
Like if you’re the 100th strongest person in the world, you could be an animal on the football field with the right skills development, coaching, team, etc. But being the 100th strongest person in the world does you no good in the Olympics, you have to make that top 3 or no one even cares who you are. No one gives a shit about the 20th best freestyle wrestler, the 80th fastest man alive, or the 200th ranked 800m Steeplechase runner, even though all of those people are objectively incredible athletes and their gifts would have given them a lot of potential in team sports had they been raised playing them.
I think it’s also kind of gross how people cheer watching men and boys damage their brains playing US football. What kind of message does it send to them? I have tried to watch it so many times, but it’s so unnecessarily violent.
Agreed. The drop off in womens sports is immense. The top ten to twenty players might be as skilled in reletive terms as their male collegues. But after that the level drops. The 100 ranked player in mens is often still a professional. In womens it regularly is some housewife or college kid.
Yes, looking at the top 10 of medal table, I found that in more developed countries, women perform better than men. This also proves my point. Only developed countries have more money invested in women’s sports, because the level of professionalism of women’s sports is low and there are not enough sports leagues to support them. Worldwide, the number of female professional athletes is far less than that of men, but there are as many female athletes as men in the Olympics.
Agreed. It’s pretty obvious that a 3rd world country like Australia has put practically no investment in women’s break dancing for example.
Note the several recent examples of “average person makes Olympics via a loophole” in the last 30 or so years have all been women. Men not so much.
In developing countries, top earning female athletes tend to be in sports which either have mass following (cricket in the subcontinent, tack and field in East Africa) or are generational medal prospects in their sports who get a lot of support for that reason.
I hate to say it, but… this was very obvious in basketball when watching the men’s vs women’s gold medal games.
Yeah, a lot of the major nations win more women than men’s medals. Russia (2016), China, Korea, Australia, germany and the Netherlands all had more female than male medal winners the last Olympics.
The Russia example is probably influenced by state sponsored doping. Women get bigger performance gains than men from steroids (source) so a country that is doping all of their athletes will see a bigger performance increase in their female competitors.
That’s entirely possible, but they didn’t win a lot of women’s medals in disciplines like sprinting, weightlifting, cycling, throwing etc. where being doped to the gills is basically mandatory to have a chance.
I would expect them to dominate a lot more in those disciplines if the reason of good women’s performance was that they doped more succesfully than the competition (similar how we saw east Germany dominate).
Afaik they have a fairly developed system for scouting and developing women’s talent - and quite a lot of sport funding on general.
Consider the fact that most nations are as obsessed with soccer as the US is with football. Those people pour resources into soccer and mostly get rewarded with zero Olympic medals for it.
US women aren’t “ahead of” US men; they’re ahead of other women.
This is a bad post.
Yes! Outside of a few specialized events, Having any kind of strong sports culture will make athletes in other areas.
First example: Let’s say a football player went to a division 1 school for football. While he was there he signed up for track and field and found out he was a decent runner/thrower/jumper.
Or after college, he didn’t make the pros, but later got into cycling, kayaking, or something else. That athlete would still have a competitive advantage due to their lifelong involvement in sport.
Useless post.
Football (soccer) in the Olympics is not valued by the majority of countries that are very good at it. It’s not even considered a third tier international achievement. Most professional teams don’t release their players to play and it just ends up being youth players a few more aged stars that have negotiated a temporary leave from their clubs.
In short, no one is seriously trying to win Olympic medals in football.
The point OP is trying to make is that the US’s obsession with American football detracts from investing more into other men’s sports. The point the commenter you replied to is making is that if this were true, countries that are obsessed with association football would be at a similar disadvantage, because their resources would go into football rather than other sports. This has no relationship whatsoever to whether or not football is valued as an Olympic sport. No one is saying you are trying to win gold in Olympic football. It’s a big picture resource allocation discussion.
That’s not the point though - irrespective of Olympic relevance soccer is the worldwide counterpart to America football when it comes to cultural dominance and resources. So this argument that the popularity of one dominant sport detracts from other Olympic sports doesn’t hold water.
Your first paragraph tells me you don’t follow Olympic soccer very closely, as Men’s Olympic soccer IS a “youth” U-23 tournament, with 3 overage players.
99% of these u-23 players are pros, as a non-FIFA tournament, clubs they do not have to release them, and it’s often during European preseason. However for the MLS and some other leagues, it’s the full off season so no problems. It’s simply hit or miss depending on that players individual relationship with their club.
The women’s tournament is full team, so no age restrictions so in many ways it’s redundant to the womens world cup in that it’s pretty much the same. Also since women’s pro soccer is not as competitive as men’s, all the players are released.
Both men and women even at soccer powerhouse countries like Spain do “try and win”, its probably a third tier trophy in Europe, but is probably a second tier trophy in Asia, Concacaf, and Conmebol.
Your first sentence belies a misunderstanding. It is one because of the facts I laid out. It was not always, they simply could not get players to turn up.
Who cares about the MLS? I’m talking about the top countries in the world. There’s one player in the MLS anyone would regard as world class and he’s ready to retire.
Spain do not care about it as evidenced by the muted reaction to their win.
You can’t say any football tournament in which most European nations barely send even two top players is of any great value.
I am English, have lived in France and Sweden, and in none of these places was it seen as anything other than a waste of time.
Like I said, in Europe the Olympic soccer tournament is a third tier cup, but not in the rest of the world.
Who cares about MLS, Liga MX, Brazilian Serie A, or Argentine Primera, J1? People in those countries do.
Personally if I ran the Olympics I would absolutely replace Mens Football with Futsal since that would actually produce the best Futsal players instead of the current Mens Tournament which features under 23 players who may not ever end up playing a single cap for their national team.
And I don’t know about other countries but if you did this, there would probably be a lot more talented people from Australia because indoor futsal is something lots of people who don’t play soccer play, heck we even have mixed teams, especially in primary school but even in the senior levels (so they have male, female and mixed 18+)
I think their point is because of what Title IX and football means. The reason for instance that the HUGE majority of volleyball teams in U.S. schools are girls volleyball is because of football.
You have a baseball team, it means there’ll probably be a softball team for girls.
You have a boys basketball team, it means there’ll be a girls basketball team.
You have a boys soccer team, it means you’ll generally have a girls soccer team too.
You have a boys lacrosse team, it means you’ll probably also have a girls lacrosse team.
You have a football team? It means you need a girls team to balance it – and most of the time, it will be volleyball (also why there are few boys volleyball teams in U.S. schools).
Soccer is hard to judge because generally speaking a lot of the best soccer athletes in the world don’t compete in the Olympics.
But even besides that, I think this might be a little outdated. Countries have put more development into other sports besides soccer now. Many more have put money into basketball, hence why basketball is more competitive than it used to be, and some into baseball, among other sports. Soccer may still be the number 1 sport, but I do believe the gap between it and other sports is slowly shrinking.
That’s a lot of words to be wrong.
Well the rest of the world has the same “problem” where King soccer/football reigns.Here in the Netherlands sports are club based not college.
But the comparison works take my local soccer team as example.There 15 senior teams with about 20+ players each.Then in a pyramid it goes down from U19 to U8. But in a radius of lets say 25km not alot.There are maybe 20/30 more clubs some bigger some smaller.99% wil never play another sports.
If your good enough you will get scouted by a pro-team.If not then you will be playing with your mates untill you quit.
I don’t love shit posts or anything but it is always funny to see people get worked up over one. There’s a million sports I don’t care about so I get it, but to the people that, like, rrrrrreally hate football, I’m sorry football hurt you!
For the record I don’t hate football, in fact I like it a lot. I just hate the culture around football, which I think is a fair criticism. It’s no different than being a part of a fandom and calling out certain parts of that fandom for being toxic.
It is hilarious when you think about it. Great post.
Going on a tangent here, but one other reason for men’s gymnastics in the USA being so lower in the psyche is actually the 1980 Olympic boycott.
At the time, one of the best men’s gymnasts in the world was an American named Kurt Thomas. In 1979, he won six medals at world championships (three of them gold), something that wasn’t done by an American again until Biles.
I believe that if the Moscow Olympics had not been boycotted, Kurt Thomas may well have gone to Moscow, won several gold medals on Russian soil in the middle of the Cold War, and inspired more men to go into men’s gymnastics.
However, this alternate timeline also presumably wouldn’t have had Gymkata (a movie in which Kurt Thomas, having turned professional and thus no longer eligible for the Olympics at the time, played a secret agent who uses a form of gymnastics-based martial arts). So call it a push.
This is interesting tbh. I’m also curious to see how the recent performance by Stephen Nedoroscik will affect men’s gymnastics. Not only did he help put it in the spotlight, but also being a nerdy guy who solves Rubik’s cubes, I think that really helps younger men get more into the sport. But it will be interesting to see if they continue with it through college or will be pushed out of it because there’s still more opportunities in other sports like football. Only time will tell I guess.
Of course, the person who has a body for gymnastics, is not very likely to want to play college football. That said, I suspect a good many shot putters, heavyweight judokas, wrestlers and weightlifters are being shunted into the defensive and offensive lines. likewise, I wonder how many sprinters are currently running patterns in spring football.
or, counterpoint, Title IX gives our women an edge that the men don’t have. meaning that while US female athletics as a system is far more developed than most other countries, the Male system is at the same level
This is a tremendously flawed and reductivist view at why American women do well at sports that negates why countries like Australia and France do equally well per capita and also somehow posits that men “underperform” despite our men being dominant in highly competitive fields.
Yeah getting gold in the 100m 400m and 1500m etc is 20 times more impressive than winning gold at synchronized diving lol. Men are doing fine and will likely have a much stronger showing next olympics
When you look at the medal count and see that the US women are winning a much larger percentage of medals compared to the men, it’s valid to say that the men aren’t as dominant as the women are.
And again, I believe this is because in men’s sports in the US, there’s a lot greater focus and resources spent on football, as opposed to Olympic sports. But I’m genuinely curious as to what makes you believe this take is flawed and open to hearing other points of view.
You’re acting like the USA is the only country where female athletes have performed better than men. That’s simply not the case. Let’s compare the USA, China and Australia:
-
Percentage of gold medals won by female athletes (including mixed medals as half a female medal): USA 66.25%, China 52.5%, Australia 72.22%
-
Percentage of total medals won by female athletes: USA 55.95%, China 58.8%, Australia 59.4%
Australia had a higher share of female gold and overall medals than the USA. China has a lower share of gold but a higher share of overall medals going to female athletes compared to the USA.
There is nothing special or unique about the gender distribution of medals in the USA.
-