The Olympics: Our National Sports Orgy!

Well, it's the Olympics so the national sports orgy is in full swing. Of course, it is really an international sports orgy, but I am focusing on the US.

The US is doing quite well of course. Not a huge surprise considering the amount of resources we devote to athletics, both time and money.

If I accidentally come across an Olympic event, it's pretty hard not to watch: unlike chess or math Olympiads for example,  sports are immediately telegenic. For me, gymnastics is the most amazing looking sport because I can't even conceive how a human being can do that.

The "race"  types of sports (running, cycling, swimming, etc..) are cool too, but I sort of don't care that someone beat someone else or some record by .01 seconds since that's within a reasonable error tolerance.

Whenever I do end up watching sports, I am always struck by two things: 

• A lot of us watching these sports are pretty fat, so we might be better off actually doing some exercise instead of just watching other people exercise. I'm including myself in this assessment. You wouldn't think it to look at me now, but I used to take fitness pretty seriously.
• I also always think to myself that since most people will never compete at this level, and since victory amounts to pretty minute performance differences, it might be better if some of the resources allocated for sports, were spent on other activities. It's a classic diminishing returns scenario even in the best case: the amount of time, energy, and effort it takes to run, swim, cycle, etc... just a little bit faster could have been allocated to acquiring or improving some other skill. It makes sense for an Olympic level athlete, but not really for the typical high school or college athlete.

In my experience, nobody wants to hear these sorts of musings while they are watching sports.

In any case, of course the real point of this post is, yeah, great, as a country we're good at sports, but this excellence has come at a cost: we are pretty bad at lots of other activities.  Moreover, I don't like the way, sports are pushed on black and brown kids as the only, or primary, avenue of success: there are certainly black, brown, and even poor whites that might have preferred to focus on some sort of academic subject (like math and computer science for example) if anyone had ever invested in this as a a viable path for them.