Waning interest in Olympics from pros
GAMES’ RELEVANCE CALLED INTO QUESTION
Every day now, the inbox dings with a new message from the Canadian Olympic Committee about the “nomination,” in the formal language, of more athletes to the national contingent for Rio 2016.
On Tuesday morning it was the judo team, eight athletes, most of whom have a Wikipedia entry that runs exactly two sentences. One of them, Sergio Pessoa Jr., competed for Canada at London 2012. He started a crowdfunding campaign last year to support his training for Rio. It has raised $1,890.
Also on Tuesday morning, the top- ranked golfer in the world, Jason Day, announced he would skip the Olympics. Last year, the Australian earned US$ 9,403,330 on the PGA Tour. Day’s absence, and that of No. 4- ranked Rory McIlroy, may yet preclude a wave of withdrawals from Rio. And though the debate about the golf stars’ reasons for doing so is fair, can we at least admit that the inclusion of pro athletes at the Games has run its course? It was an interesting idea once, but now we see it for what it is: an unnecessary distraction for some elite athletes, even as others are seeking handouts from strangers just to be part of it.
The golfers are just the most obvious example of the wide gap be- tween the relative importance of the Olympics to some Olympians and to certain prospective ones.
Day and McIlroy have faced some criticism, though hardly a punishing wave of it, for blaming their reluctance to play squarely on the fears of the Zika virus, as opposed to acknowledging that the schedule and travel are a big part of giving Rio a pass.
With the Open Championship and the PGA Championship coming within a week of each other immediately preceding the Olympics, competitors will come off an unusually intense period, then have to travel way down to the bottom side of the world to compete for a week. ( Although I suppose it’s still the top of the world to Day. My northern hemisphere bias is showing.)
Day also has a Canadian Open title defence to squeeze in between the two majors and the best players in the world tend to have a busy fall schedule since the advent of the World’s Dumbest Playoffs, formally known as the FedEx Cup. McIlroy also will have a Ryder Cup on the docket, assuming Great Britain hasn’t withdrawn from that European institution by then.
How much of the reluctance to go to Rio is due to the schedule, how much is fear of a scary virus and how much is because wealthy pro golfers simply don’t give a damn about the Olympics? Only they know, but in a sport in which you have to go back past Bobby Jones just to find someone who won an Olympic gold, it’s fair to say none of these guys ever picked up a club in the hopes of one day bringing a similar medal home. But if golf ’s return to the Olympics was happening in Miami, instead of a nine-hour flight from Miami, you can bet that all the big names would be going and all of them would convince themselves in a hurry that the shot at gold was hugely important to them if they found themselves in contention on Sunday.
Outside of golf, NBA stars like LeBron James and Stephen Curry have given their regrets to Rio and the outcry over the snub has been nonexistent, because everyone knows the United States is fielding a powerhouse anyway and because guys who made it to the Finals of a long NBA season have every reason to want to rest up and heal before another long NBA season. Even here in Canada, the country’s suddenly large NBA contingent has almost unanimously passed on the short Olympic qualifying tournament taking place next week in the Philippines. The fact that so many couldn’t be bothered to give qualifying a shot suggests the allure of an Olympic medal has dimmed considerably since NBA players first took part in 1992.
Over in the Winter Games, meanwhile, the NHL and its players association went to the trouble of organizing an entirely new — well, sort of new — international tournament just so it could escape the hassle of an Olympics on the other side of the world in 2018. No one will acknowledge publicly that the World Cup of Hockey effectively ended the chance of NHL participation in South Korea’s Games, but it would be a shock if it didn’t. ( Which also raises an interesting question: If the last two men’s hockey golds had been won by, say, Finland and the Czech Republic, would the NHL have been so quick to revive an Olympic alternative?)
If Rio 2016 comes and goes and the worst that can be said about it is that some golfers and NBA players no- showed, it will have been a roaring success. Just Tuesday, the CEO of the organizing committee said in Washington that Zika wasn’t even on his top-10 list of worries, which was supposed to be reassuring, I think. No doubt the non- presence of Jason Day or LeBron James wouldn’t crack the top 25 list.
But if having the pros there doesn’t really matter, why include them in the first place?