Opinion by Associate Professor David Pritchard.
David M. Pritchard.
With the Paris Olympic and Paralympic Games about to begin, debate is again heating up about what countries spend on Olympic and Paralympic teams. Australia has spent a staggering 1.2 billion dollars on getting our elite sportspeople to Paris. This means that each gold medal that an Australian wins at the 2024 Games will cost several tens of millions of dollars.
Paris-bound sportspeople and managers are convinced that this is money well spent. For them, the value of Olympic victory is enormous and obvious. However, for others, 1.2 billion dollars appears wasteful. It is scarce public funding that could be better spent on doctors, nurses and physical-education teachers.
Funding the Olympic and Paralympic team is hotly debated among politicians as well as around kitchen tables and in workplaces. This debate is also now international because many other countries are now heavily subsidising their national teams. This is why contemporary elite sportspeople must fight so hard for gold medals.
What is missing in this important debate is a cost-benefit analysis. For example, National Olympic Committees rarely detail what the obvious benefit of Olympic and Paralympic success is. A promising way to advance this important debate lies in the lessons of history. Understanding the value of Olympic victory in the past can help us to work out what it is today.
Of course, it was Pierre de Coubertin who, in 1894, founded the International Olympic Committee in Paris. In the 130 years since, the Olympic and Paralympic Games have become the world’s largest secular event. Impressive as the modern Games are, they are still only a small part of a much longer and older Olympic history.
The ancient Greeks staged Olympic Games for 1000 years. Their Olympics attracted sportsmen from right across the Greek world’s 1000 city-states. By studying this ancient Olympic history, we can gain new insights in what we get out of modern Olympic and Paralympic success.
The ancient Greeks valued Olympic victory even more highly than we do. Each Greek city-state gave its Olympic victors free meals as well as free front-row tickets at local sports events – for life. These were the highest honours that the Greeks could give. They were otherwise given only to victorious generals. That they were given to Olympians shows that the ancient Greeks believed that such victors significantly benefitted their states.
National Olympic Committees might not be good at detailing the benefit of Olympic success. But the ancient Greeks were. In a legal speech, for example, about the Olympics of 416 BC, a son explains why his father had entered an unprecedented seven teams into the chariot-racing contest. He did so because he realised that ‘the city-states of victors became famous’. The speaker explained that Olympians were understood to be representatives of their hometowns. Consequently, their victories were ‘in the name of their city-state in front of the entire Greek world’.
What made an Olympic victory so valuable for an ancient Greek state was the international publicity. With 45,000 spectators at the ancient Games, theirs were also the world’s largest event. This meant that whatever took place at the Games became known to the entire Greek world as ambassadors, sportsmen and spectators returned home and reported what they had seen.
Because so many Greeks attended the Games, it was possible for the entire Greek world to learn of the sporting victory that a Greek state had gained through one of its Olympians. Such a sporting victory gave a city-state of otherwise no importance rare international prominence. For one that was a major power, it gained uncontested proof of the standing that it claimed in relation to its rivals.
The only other way that a Greek state had to raise its international ranking was to defeat a rival state in battle. But the outcome of a battle was always uncertain and could cost the lives of many thousands of citizens. Therefore, an ancient Greek state judged a citizen who had been victorious at the Olympics worthy of the highest honours because he had raised its standing and done so without the need for his fellow citizens to risk their lives in war.
This understanding of the benefit of ancient Olympic success helps us to work out what it is today. It advances the important modern debate about whether the heavy state subsidisation of a national Olympic team is justified.
We still view Olympians and Paralympians as our national representatives, and we are still part of an international system of competing states. Consequently, an important lesson from the ancient Olympics is that international sporting success can improve a state’s international standing. Therefore, the ancient Games do provide some justification for spending serious money on national Olympic teams.
Nevertheless, we must not push these parallels too far. For good or for ill, we are no longer ancient Greeks, and sport and war are no longer the only international stages. New bodies – such as the G20, the OECD and the World Health Organisation – also rank modern states in terms of health, education and participation in non-elite sports. In this new world order, we will hold our ranking only if we spend just as heavily on doctors, nurses and physical-education teachers.
Dr David Pritchard is Associate Professor of Greek History at The University of Queensland, where he chairs the discipline of Classics and Ancient History.
