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Fforget about the feel-good factor. The warm glow generated by the GB team winning gold for the three day eventing or modern pentathlon will quickly fade. Anyone who thinks that sporting success will lead to a mini economic boom is wrong.
This, however, does not mean that the Tokyo Olympics have no impact on the economy and its performance. There are important lessons to be learned from how and why UK athletes have gone from serial underachievers to global competitors over the past 25 years.
More than half a century ago, athlete-turned-journalist Chris Brasher wrote an account of the 1968 Mexico Games, an event that mixed politics – the black power podium protests of American athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos – with memorable performances. It was also at the Olympic Games that Dick Fosbury revolutionized the high jump with his flop technique.
Brasher’s book provides clues as to how the economy would change over the next half century and what would be needed to be successful.
Check out the list of medalists at the end of the book and two things stand out. First, China does not appear anywhere in the medal table because it did not participate. Second, the participation of women was much more limited. There wouldn’t have been medals for a Laura Kenny earlier because there was no women’s cycling; in athletics, it was believed that women could not cope at any distance greater than 800 meters. Rowing, sailing, boxing, hockey and football were events reserved for men. Over the past 53 years, China has become an economic superpower and more and more women have joined the paid workforce. Both trends were evident in Tokyo.
Teams now approach games in a much more professional way. Brasher tells the story of a 19-year-old runner, John Davies, who was unable to make it to the start of his 800m because no member of the British medical team was expert enough to treat his injury to the leg and by the time he got help from another team it was too late. Such amateurism would be unthinkable today, with elite athletes having the best emergency personnel to look after their physical and mental needs. The way some companies treat – or rather mistreat – their people today suggests that sport has a lot to teach companies when it comes to managing human capital.
Mexico City was a controversial choice to host the games as most of the events took place at 7,000 feet above sea level, where the air was perfect for sprinters but brutal for average runners and long distance unless they live or train at high altitudes. for long periods.
It didn’t take long for other countries to look to emulate the success of Kenyans and Ethiopians, and those who could afford it paid for their elite athletes to train in training camps in high altitude. Closing the gap meant learning from successes, a lesson that applies to companies as well as athletes.
BCA Research analyst Dhaval Joshi last week cited the example of the Fosbury flop as an example of how productivity gains are often simply the result of finding better ways of doing things. Until the arrival of deep foam mats, high jumpers used the straddle technique and would have risked serious injury when crossing the bar backwards, but technological developments have changed that. The new rugs meant that Fosbury – in Brasher’s words – was ready to ‘try’. Others followed.
The investment clearly made a big difference in the Olympic success of the GB team. The medal tally in Mexico was five gold, five silver and three bronze, which by standards in some of the games that followed was a reasonable performance. It wasn’t until John Major decided to put money into the National Sport Academy that the gold rush began.
Major’s decision was (and is) not without criticism. There are those who say that because the investment came from the national lottery, it was in fact a tax on the poor for the benefit of the wealthy. Others say it doesn’t matter whether Britain wins five or 50 gold medals, and the money could be better spent elsewhere.
Yet, judged on its own terms, investing in sport has worked. This led to improved facilities and better training, and allowed athletes to focus solely on success. The UK economy continues to lag behind in investment among the major developed countries and it shows. The UK has invested heavily in sport and it shows too.
Britain’s most notable artist in Mexico was David Hemery, who broke the world record in the 400-meter hurdles but spent much of his life in the United States. In this regard, it illustrates one of the fundamental economic problems in the UK: there are world-class artists but not enough.
Andy Haldane, when he was chief economist at the Bank of England, said it was a ‘long tail’ problem: the UK had businesses that were on the border productivity but far too many that did not meet the best global standards. .
The GB team does not suffer from the traditional British disease. Cyclists are always looking for improvements to their bikes or kit that could give them the tiniest edge. The best coaches are hired, often overseas. Money is plentiful for sports in which Britain believes it can be competitive.
In this sense, the approach was similar to that followed by the fast growing countries of East Asia, which decided to focus on becoming global players in a limited number of industrial sectors. There was a plan and there were long-term investments. It paid off.
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