3 ms·

I'm pretty surprised at the HN comments and sentiment here of "if the athletes don't like it don't participate." It is a clear monopoly by the IOC. The IOC is

I'm pretty surprised at the HN comments and sentiment here of "if the athletes don't like it don't participate." It is a clear monopoly by the IOC. The IOC is a business. The athletes are the talent. Look at any comparable business and the talent makes a way bigger % of the money, actors in the movie industry, musicians in the music industry, professional athletes in NFL, MLB, NHL, NBA etc. These are all "jobs" that people would gladly do for low pay just like the Olympics if that was their only choice. Does that mean that the other industries are overpaying their talent? No imo. It's reasonable to expect that the people that provide the talent and a large part of the value to the industry deserve a large portion of the rewards. Professional athletes and hollywood have strong unions to fight for fair pay(they used to be exploited for low pay), the music industry is a semimonopoly and does screw artists, but at least there is some level of competition. If you don't like one record company you can always switch labels. The problem with the Olympics and what makes them so valuable to begin with is their rarity. They only come around once every four years. A top tier athlete may only make one Olympics in his/her lifetime and perhaps as many as ~three. Are you really going to organize and "holdout" for a whole Olympic games with your fellow athletes to maybe better the financial position for all your fellow Olympians? It's one thing to sit out a season when your expected career is 10 seasons and you may only have to sit out 1/3 of one season, it's entirely different when you may have to sit out your entire career. The athletes are being exploited because 1. IOC is a monopoly 2. Their careers are short 3. It's too risky to organize because the risk of not competing is too high. They've trained so hard to get there, to not compete is not really an option. 4. Olympics only happen once every four years. It's a very similar situation as the NCAA except for #4. If you want to make it "not about the money" that's fine by me, make tickets to attend these events cheap or free, let any network cover the games(why does NBC get a coverage monopoly?), get rid of the endorsements and ads, make all the IOC "volunteer" administrators unpaid, but it's never going to happen. When coaches and administrators are making millions and the talent is making close to zero, the talent is clearly being exploited.

dragonwriter 10y ago
> Look at any comparable business and the talent makes a way bigger % of the money, actors in the movie industry, musicians in the music industry, professional athletes in NFL, MLB, NHL, NBA etc. Actors or musicians have a very narrow slice at the top that makes decent money compared to that that is taken by industry machinery, and a lot of lesser "professionals" that make very little compared to the middle men. Same with athletes; the major enterprises you refer to are the top tier within their sports, with a lot of lesser venues underneath. The Olympics is kind of weird, because it includes lots of sports that don't generate the interest of major sports, and large numbers of teams -- many from areas that aren't major media markets for the sport in question -- for all of the sports, even ones that are major in at least some corner of the globe. By doing that, it effectively is, from a marketing perspective, like a combination of the major and minor leagues together -- the ability to make money is influenced, to the extent its influenced by the athletes at all, only by a very small subset of them, and mostly by the ability of third-parties to weave narratives around the aggregate of the competitions. You could make an "Olympics" that would support a distribution of pay more like the NFL, but you'd need to kill most of the sports, and many of the teams in most of the remaining sports, to do that. And it wouldn't look much like the Olympics.
eanzenberg 10y ago
It really is "If you don't like it don't attend." Go promote your archery competition on ESPN and see how many viewers tune in and how much money you earn.
notahacker 10y ago
I'm not sure there is really any comparable business. I mean, if you look at the NFL, MLB, NHL, NBA then (i) the executives make orders of magnitude more (ii) the expenses are spread around a much smaller pool of people and training facilities and (iii) the sportspeople play more than once every four years and the second and third tier players are much more widely recognised. The thing is, you could take away the president of the IOC's not-exactly-FIFA-esque expense account featured in this article and you've got just enough money to pay stipends - the meagre stipends the article complains about - for 10-12 more Olympic hopefuls. And there are 10,200 athletes competing in Rio, and for every athlete that made it, there are several more that devoted years of their time and their local federation's expense budget to trying to get there. Even if the IOC and the Olympic organizing committees had no costs at all and simply passed on all its 1.4bn per annum income on to local federations, there's really not that much to share between training and developing 50k athletes that might make the cut in facilities in 200 countries; certainly not enough to give them proper cash salaries after expenses. Sure, some executives might be overpaid, but that's really not why most Olympians are poor or indebted until they medal or break into the media and most of them aren't rich afterwards. [It doesn't help that the article conflates the IOC with how the individual US sporting associations choose to divvy up their cash, which I'm sure is more favourable to the senior executives and less favourable to the athletes than the vast majority of national associations.] It's not the monopoly that's keeping athletes from earning an adequate living from Olympic revenue, it's that there's simply not enough money to go around, unless governments or individual sponsors decide to chip in to pay athletes on top of that. Needless to say, athletes already living on the breadline aren't going to be very enamoured with the suggestion of getting rid of the endorsements and ads so they have to pay all their training costs too.
nawitus 10y ago
How can it be a "monopoly" when there are other championships in each sport? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAAF_World_Championships_in_Athletics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAAF_World_Championships_in_At...
princeb 10y ago
> at any comparable business like college football?

dragonwriter 10y ago

> Look at any comparable business and the talent makes a way bigger % of the money, actors in the movie industry, musicians in the music industry, professional athletes in NFL, MLB, NHL, NBA etc. Actors or musicians have a very narrow slice at the top that makes decent money compared to that that is taken by industry machinery, and a lot of lesser "professionals" that make very little compared to the middle men. Same with athletes; the major enterprises you refer to are the top tier within their sports, with a lot of lesser venues underneath. The Olympics is kind of weird, because it includes lots of sports that don't generate the interest of major sports, and large numbers of teams -- many from areas that aren't major media markets for the sport in question -- for all of the sports, even ones that are major in at least some corner of the globe. By doing that, it effectively is, from a marketing perspective, like a combination of the major and minor leagues together -- the ability to make money is influenced, to the extent its influenced by the athletes at all, only by a very small subset of them, and mostly by the ability of third-parties to weave narratives around the aggregate of the competitions. You could make an "Olympics" that would support a distribution of pay more like the NFL, but you'd need to kill most of the sports, and many of the teams in most of the remaining sports, to do that. And it wouldn't look much like the Olympics.

eanzenberg 10y ago

It really is "If you don't like it don't attend." Go promote your archery competition on ESPN and see how many viewers tune in and how much money you earn.

notahacker 10y ago

I'm not sure there is really any comparable business. I mean, if you look at the NFL, MLB, NHL, NBA then (i) the executives make orders of magnitude more (ii) the expenses are spread around a much smaller pool of people and training facilities and (iii) the sportspeople play more than once every four years and the second and third tier players are much more widely recognised. The thing is, you could take away the president of the IOC's not-exactly-FIFA-esque expense account featured in this article and you've got just enough money to pay stipends - the meagre stipends the article complains about - for 10-12 more Olympic hopefuls. And there are 10,200 athletes competing in Rio, and for every athlete that made it, there are several more that devoted years of their time and their local federation's expense budget to trying to get there. Even if the IOC and the Olympic organizing committees had no costs at all and simply passed on all its 1.4bn per annum income on to local federations, there's really not that much to share between training and developing 50k athletes that might make the cut in facilities in 200 countries; certainly not enough to give them proper cash salaries after expenses. Sure, some executives might be overpaid, but that's really not why most Olympians are poor or indebted until they medal or break into the media and most of them aren't rich afterwards. [It doesn't help that the article conflates the IOC with how the individual US sporting associations choose to divvy up their cash, which I'm sure is more favourable to the senior executives and less favourable to the athletes than the vast majority of national associations.] It's not the monopoly that's keeping athletes from earning an adequate living from Olympic revenue, it's that there's simply not enough money to go around, unless governments or individual sponsors decide to chip in to pay athletes on top of that. Needless to say, athletes already living on the breadline aren't going to be very enamoured with the suggestion of getting rid of the endorsements and ads so they have to pay all their training costs too.

nawitus 10y ago

How can it be a "monopoly" when there are other championships in each sport? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAAF_World_Championships_in_Athletics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAAF_World_Championships_in_At...

princeb 10y ago

> at any comparable business like college football?