The top-quartile Games

Eventually your profession gets bred into your bones. When I watch the Olympics, the economist in me keeps thinking “How rich we are!”

The TV broadcast is great. It’s in high def and “living colour,” as NBC used to say. There are multiple feeds so you can watch the sports you like and ignore the ones you don’t. The signal never breaks up. It’s not like the 1960s, when we watched on grainy videotape in black and white and the announcers often sounded as if they were using tin cans and string for amplification. Granted, achieving reliable planet-wide, real-time communications in only two dimensions is probably a minimal achievement for a species. But our species has finally got there and it certainly makes for great viewing.

How rich we are, as well, that some of us can now spend our lives just doing sports. I realize that’s not true for all the athletes, many of whom train on the side and have to take leave from real jobs for the final Olympic push. But an appreciable number do seem to do their sport pretty much full time. That may not be good for them as people. The classical ideal is balance. But people making a living doing half-pipe 960s is a clear sign of wealth.

Non-athletes make livings at it, too. The New York Times reports that Norway has no fewer than 30 ski-wax technicians in Pyeongchang. The Times thought it pretty funny that bad waxing can be a national scandal, as it was when Norway’s nordic relays missed the medals at Sochi. But we Canadians understand that. We’re a country that credits our hockey success at least partly to loonies frozen for luck under centre ice.

The CBC isn’t here to mention it so I will note that not everyone in the world is rich. If you look at the top 15 medal-winning countries as of midweek, they’re all top quartile in terms of incomes. The CIA World Factbook provides per capita GDP for 198 countries, ranging from Lichtenstein (US$139,400) to Somalia (less than US$700). Of the top three on the medals list, Norway was number eight at $70,600 (all of these are U.S. dollars), Germany number 19 at $50,200, and Canada number 25 at $48,100. The average GDP rank of the top 15 countries was 28. The lowest was Belarus, number 73, at $18,600, and second from the bottom was Slovakia, number 42, at $32,900. Tonga, Nigeria and Jamaica are great in the opening ceremonies but not so well on actual snow and ice.

Speaking of which, the other distinctive thing about the medal-winning countries is that they’re very much bottom quartile when it comes to average yearly temperature. On the list Wikipedia kindly provides, we’re actually the coldest, at minus 5.35 degrees Celsius, edging out Russia (-5.10 degrees) by a runny nose. But most of the other medal-winners are in positive single digits, temperature-wise. The warmest is Italy, at 13.5 degrees on average.

I wonder how Steve Bannon is enjoying the Olympics, which are a quadrennial tribute to nationalism. The competition is superficially friendly but can have a nationalist edge — as in Canada-U.S. women’s hockey. And the countries doing well are Trump/Bannon countries, in the sense that the president wouldn’t mind more immigration from almost all of them.

My own view, as someone who appreciates nation-states for the good they do but also favours globalization, is that the fluid nature of Olympic nationalism is bigly reassuring.

In one of her reports from the Games, the National Post’s Christie Blatchford wrote about how shockingly homogeneous Korea is, with all five members (including the alternate) of the roundrobin-winning South Korean ladies curling team being named Kim. Yes, but the goalie of the Korean men’s hockey team isn’t named Kim. He’s named Matt Dalton and he’s from Seaforth, Ont. Other Korean team players not named Kim are Eric Regan, Mike Swift, Brock Radunske, Bryan Young and Alex Plante, from such places as Kitchener, Brandon, Peterborough, and Whitby.

We don’t just export Olympic athletes, moreover. We import them, too. Until the 2014-15 season, our double-medallist speed skater (gold at 10,000 metres, silver at 5,000) Ted-Jan Bloemen competed for the Netherlands, where he was born and raised. His incentive to take out dual citizenship, which his New Brunswick-born father also has, came from love of the Maple Leaf, yes, but also from the fact that in 2014 he had the eighth-best time in the world but the seven people in front of him were all Dutch.

For an economist it’s heartening to see that national boundaries, whether legal or geographic, prove surmountable when strong interests are in play. When push comes to shove (or when it comes to the tush push, as the short track speedskaters might say) globalization wins. And so do we all.