The Olympic business

Opinion: The Paris Olympics has elevated participating athletes to newfound levels of stardom, with the best of the best gaining legions of new fans and social media followers.  
But is it all an equal opportunity competition, or highly evolved political business exercise?
Professional sport is all to do with politics, and it has been for a long while: the imperial palaces in Rome and in Constantinople were literally built into the premiere sporting venues of both cities, indicating how intimately connected political power and sporting prowess was in these two precursors to Western society.   
As the ‘opium of the masses’, administered on behalf of the ruling classes of the Roman Empire, professional sport competed with established Christianity.
Consequently, Christian influence led to the suppression of professional sport in the West during the period between the rebellion by the chariot racing teams against the Emperor Justinian II in 532, and its revival as a political tool in 1936 by the (pagan) Nazis. 
The current Olympic event symbology is largely unchanged from that developed by Dr Joseph Goebbels, and so ably presented to the World by Leni Riefenstahl in her Nazi propaganda film Olympia.  
Modern professional sport was developed from the Goebbels model as a component of propaganda by the major protagonists of the Cold War. It survived the collapse of communism and embraced the neoliberal model. 
The Olympics of today is an expression of that embrace. It is now a component of a gigantic international ‘pseudo-Corinthian’ sports industry. 
As such it is a commercial operation that sells ‘feel-good’ to politicians and wealthy individuals/organisations in exchange for large amounts of money. 
Consequently, the Olympics represents the visible fruiting body of a fungus-like professional sports organism whose hyphal network is now invisibly embedded within society across the globe and draws sustenance from it. Often to the overall detriment of these societies. 
It is notable that Olympic gold medals are heavily concentrated among societies that are wealthy, totalitarian – or both.  
It is also notable within the Western democracies that expenditure on the opium of pseudo-Corinthian sport by both public and private entities has increased in line with the concentration of wealth within small communities who have an interest in creating distractive ‘feel-good’ for the increasingly impoverished and hopeless members of their societies who are not part of that club.
What is the practical impact of this? 
In 2000 it cost Australia AUD$38m to generate a gold medal. Extrapolation would suggest that each gold medal that New Zealand wins in 2024 will cost NZ society at least NZD$50m. 
That equates to around 1500 hip replacement operations per gold medal won. 
Many citizens might think that freeing 1500 people permanently from extreme pain and disability is a better use of that community money than a bit of short-term jingoistic feel-good.
However, it’s likely that Chinese President Xi Jinping and our Prime Minister Christopher Luxon would disagree – and they call the shots in their respective societies.
It appears that many athletes are becoming far more proactive and professional about the development of their own individual brand. This has to be looked at from two points of view: that of the athlete themselves, and that of the sports organisation that produced them.  
The motivation for the athlete is really quite straightforward. The development of the athlete’s personal image into a revenue stream is a way in which their investment can show a return that may extend beyond their Olympic career.  
The internet has allowed individuals to develop their own sovereign public identity, which can then be ‘sold’ as a potential influencer directly to those who wish to exploit it for commercial gain.  
The position of the sports associations on personal athlete marketing is a bit more complex.  
It relates to the nature of the pseudo-Corinthian sporting organisation’s commercial Olympian athlete manufacturing processes. The modern high-performance athlete is manufactured for sale to the political and economic rulers of our society via a specific industrial process which has two discrete components – the ‘funnel’ and the ‘force’. 
In pseudo-Corinthian sport, the sports association funnel extends out into the community and amateur/school sports. It takes huge numbers of young individuals and observes and assesses them over several stages. 
At each stage the athletes are thinned out, leading from an initial intake of thousands each year to maybe a final funnel output of fewer than 10 some years later.  
This small output group of highly extreme but ‘raw’ individuals have thus been identified as worthy of the massive individual investment that will be made in them by the force.    
The force then takes this small group and develops them further, usually on a full-time professional basis.   
The very, very few who survive this process – maybe one or two each year, become the final output of the force – Olympians. 
Each one of these is a full-time professional athlete representing a very substantial investment and is the distillate of several hundred or thousands of hopefuls who started the journey several years earlier.  
However, pseudo-Corinthian sports organisations only acquire revenue from successful Olympians, which is another step up again.
Successful Olympians are therefore very rare and expensive beasts.  
This means that maximum economic advantage should be wrung from each and every of one them by their pseudo-Corinthian creators while they are briefly in the public eye.  
It thus makes economic sense that associations would help Olympians to develop their personal image beyond their sporting prowess, as this helps them secure the community resources necessary to grow the force and funnel components of the industrial process that manufactured them.
A more powerfully, personally branded successful Olympian can be used as an enhanced asset in negotiations by the associations in order to acquire direct public/private funding to support the professionalised ‘force’ part of the Olympian production process. 
While these sports associations may be ‘not for profit’ and are often still disguised as amateur/charitable organisations, this does not stop them from handing out big pay packets, which can get bigger if more money comes in – thus possibly explaining the association’s motivation.    
Likewise, a powerfully branded and successful Olympian athlete can attract more of the essential ‘fresh bait’ for the funnel part of the association’s pseudo-Corinthian meat grinding-process in the form of impressionable teenagers who wish to emulate their successful branded Olympian role model that marketing has presented to them. 
Very few of these bright-eyed teenagers will actually survive to do so, but little is said publicly about these ‘legions of losers’ … it’s just not good business.
While it is hardly ever described as such, it is a very effective commercial business model, although it can also be incidentally highly destructive to its environment. 
Rowing New Zealand, which claims to be a benign and not-for-profit organisation, is probably the best example of its application in New Zealand. 
Since Rob Waddell won his Olympic gold in Sydney in 2000, and the first pseudo-Corinthian cash poured into the sport, the Rowing NZ funnel (schools, Maadi Cup, Interprovincials etc) and force (High Performance Centre, Karapiro and overseas elite programmes) system has been applied, consolidated and expanded as a result of a continual stream of successful Olympian-related revenue. 
This has progressed to the point that rowing has been largely annihilated as an amateur club-based sport for ‘normal’ young adults operating outside of the professionalised Rowing NZ ‘funnel and force’ Olympian rower manufacturing system in this country.  Personally, as an (ex) amateur club rower, club coach and club president, I think that’s a pity.