Why doesn't America win all the gold medals?

The problem no one is talking about.

As we round into the final stretch of these very enjoyable Paris Olympics, Americans have a lot to cheer. Women’s gymnastics has returned to the top of the podium, Noah Lyles is the fastest man alive, and the US will again end up with the most gold medals and the most total medals.

In the middle of a divisive election year, it might seem churlish to treat these victories as anything other than an occasion for national unity and pride. But not for nothing is the Olympic motto Citius, Altius, Fortius: the spirit of the games demands that we aim ever higher. 

The United States of America is the richest, most powerful nation known to history. In just three months, we will elect a new leader to our highest office. It’s an awesome collective responsibility, and any serious person will not cast their vote without first determining how each would-be Caesar would answer the most urgent question of our day: 

Do you believe that our nation should commit itself to the goal, before the decade is out, of winning the gold medal for all events contested in a single Olympic Games?

Candidates who answer “no” should be made to explain their reasoning. 

Maybe they would protest that the timeline is not viable: the end of the decade is 2030, a Winter Olympics year. And being good at curling is not a noble enough pursuit for a people who have walked on the moon. Fair enough. We can lengthen the timeline without lowering our ambitions all that much: the US should commit itself to the goal of winning every gold medal before the end of the next decade, at the 2040 Summer Olympics. 

A more fundamental objection would be that sports are by design semi-random, so it would be foolish for any nation to stake its honor on a perfect record. In sports, the best competitor doesn’t always win. Even if by some statistically negligible turn of events we made it to the brink of a gold medal sweep, the other countries would become resentful and find ways to cheat. It’s happened before.

Another valid point. Perhaps it would be altogether better then - still inspirational, but practical too in the American tradition - for a President to stand before a joint session of Congress and declare that we should dedicate the full resources of our great nation to making sure that US athletes are minus odds betting favorites in every single Olympic event.

The only wrong answer as far as I’m concerned would be to reject the project outright on the basis that we have more important problems to worry about. Climate change, border security, national defense, affordable healthcare, AI alignment, fighting structural racism or fighting wokeness - literally any issue someone says is their biggest concern - if they can’t explain why their administration’s priority policy is incompatible with the pursuit of US sporting supremacy, then they clearly haven’t thought enough about whatever it is they claim to care so deeply about. 

Sixty two years ago next month, John F. Kennedy stood before a crowd of 40,000 (assembled at a football stadium, it should be noted, just one example of the historical connection between grand national ambition and athletics) and made the case for another preposterously difficult, extravagantly symbolic effort:

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too. 

Back then we had Sputnik and the Soviets to worry about. Now, with the Russians banned for doping and invading, and with the Chinese only winning events that are the Olympic equivalent of the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Film, it might not seem like the marginal gold medal would do much for our national prestige. 

But complacency has a cost. There’s a lot of talk about how Americans have lost trust in institutions, but why shouldn’t we when we just lost to landlocked Switzerland in beach volleyball? Or consider the BMX events. BMX stands for “bicycle motocross” - this despite the fact that there is no motor on a bicycle. It’s the dumbest event possible, and yet the nation that gave the world the KFC double down sandwich has never won a gold medal in it.

At least we’re still the best at guns though, right? Actually, the situation is analogous to how we spend the most on healthcare but have lower life expectancy than other countries. China has won five times our number of shooting event gold medals at the 2024 Olympics, and the fact that Fox News isn’t running round the clock stories about how this is happening on Joe Biden’s watch is a sign that Rupert’s kids are not serious people. 

Winning a single gold medal is hard. Winning all of them is impossible. And yet we must try. Because my belief is that if the US were to truly commit itself to doing the things necessary to become the best in the world at every sport, it would also be doing things that lead to better outcomes in other areas - economic prosperity, social cohesion, cultural creativity, and international stability, to name just a few.¹

There is nothing more American than flipping through the channels, seeing that Latvia is playing Ecuador in the handball quarterfinals, and thinking, “I have no idea how this game works, but I bet if anyone cared about it in the US, we’d be unstoppable.” 

And we would be. So let’s do this, America!

1. In a much longer early draft of this post, I wrote at tedious length about why. On the economic front, I made an argument that readers of Sunk Thoughts will be familiar with from the work of Bryan Caplan, Matt Yglesias, etc. Basically, having a lot of people and a lot of money helps win medals, so the US should unleash economic growth (AI, regulatory reform, possibly some Operation Warp Speed-inspired state sponsored doping programs with huge spillover benefits in terms of pharmaceutical innovation). An obvious focus area being high skill immigration. Actually low skill immigration would help a lot too, because we'll need construction workers to build natatoriums and janitors to wipe down wrestling mats, and also, what if the guy whose job it is to mow the rugby field has a daughter who turns out to be a freak powerlifter? 

Many would argue that social cohesion will fall if we dramatically increase immigration levels in the name of winning some gold medals in obscure Olympic sports. You could try to counterbalance potential backlash with a few right-coded policies (Orban-style fertility tax rebates to produce more Olympic babies?) You could also tweak the messaging. Athletes like to give thanks to god after winning, so let’s frame this all as part of a revival of Judeo-Christian values. It also strikes me that most conservative parts of the US heartland are crazy for college football, which has already embraced this vision of a free market for labor through the transfer portal and NIL deals. Let’s build on that precedent, and while we’re at it, let’s copy some other things from college football too. Massive tailgates before badminton matches, water polo coaches with names like Dabo, an actual live bald eagle mascot swooping onto the field prior the start of the archery competition. These things are not irrelevant as we reflect on the notion of American exceptionalism.

As a sort of sub-footnote, there’s a lot that could be written about the role college athletics would play in this Olympic project. Those looking for evidence in support of Caplan’s argument that higher education is not about imparting students with useful skills could start their search at the 90,000 seat stadium looming over campus. I’m skeptical that spending two hundred million dollars on an athletics training facility has many spillover benefits in the form of knowledge production, but you’d at least hope it helps with the actual athletics. Sports are one part of a very expensive set experiential consumer goods bundled together under the branding “college.” What this means for future economic growth is at best ambiguous, but in terms of present day resources invested in American athletes, our nation’s unique obsession with seeing State beat Tech (or vice versa) is a net positive.

Because my brand is a hybrid of Based Patriot and Globalist Cuck, I personally think it’s wonderful that the best young athletes from around the world increasingly come to the US to compete against our native born college athletes. For instance, before she took home the 100 meter gold at the Paris Olympics, St. Lucian sprinter Julien Alfred won the NCAA championship while competing for the Texas Longhorns. Likewise, the superstar French swimmer Leon Marchand trained with legendary coach Bob Bowman while studying for a computer science degree at Arizona State University. Could we get these athletes to switch allegiance to the US instead? It's a tough problem, maybe an impossible one given the IOC mandates a waiting period before eligibility, which athletes entering their prime years might not be willing to endure. Obviously the best case scenario would be someone like Marchand choosing not to compete for his native country because instead he stays in the US and uses his computer science degree to found a company that builds AGI. Short of this though, maybe we should support the other comp sci majors working on AGI so that we get rich enough to pay Marchand an insane amount to rep the red, white, and blue (non-French version).

It might be that the current college sports setup produces a huge misallocation of resources, not just away from higher ROI research and teaching, but also away from the sports the US needs to get good at. Title IX requirements for equal participation opportunities have increased investment in women’s sports, but led to cuts for some men’s sports (e.g. volleyball). On net I think Title IX has probably boosted American female Olympians more than it’s hurt male ones, so we’re gonna focus our attention elsewhere.

Basketball comes to mind. America is crazy for March Madness, but as fun as it is when an underdog wins, it’s teaching us to appreciate the wrong things. What we really need is for more of the sub-elite players to stop chasing the dream of an occasional upset and to channel their talents to versions of the game where they could be the very best. Team USA has LeBron, Steph, Ant Edwards, et. al holding it down for the 5 man game. Let’s get more fringe NBA prospects playing the 3x3 game early so they can have time to master it.

Finally, every American believes in their heart of hearts that if NFL athletes chose to play a different sport, we would win all the Olympic medals and all the World Cups for the rest of eternity. I would never suggest that we sacrifice football to get good at some other, less awesome sports, but perhaps we could convince Myles Garrett and Justin Jefferson to pull a Bo Jackson and compete in second sports during the offseason.