[SebC]

Originally Posted by The Ditch

How embarrassing. Instead of giving the CBC a billion dollars a year of taxpayer money we could give them 500 million and give the other 500 million towards sponsorship and funding for our athletes. Oh I know I know, everyone is going to miss that latest episode of Little Mosque on the Prairie.

To some degreee, that approach could actually yield dividends if it increases interest in the games. Sadly, we're more enthralled with Michael Phelps and fireworks than with Canadian athletes, so it probably wouldn't.

Originally Posted by Hemmer

I think I heard that Canada has the 7th largest team at the Beijing Olympics. For me, I would propose that instead of funding and sending over so many 'middle of the pack' athletes.. we should focus on the elite ones and do what we can to develop them instead.

That's what Own the Podium and Road to Success are all about. Of course, the problem with that approach is that you end up not funding the kayakker who finishes 6th and would've been 4th if he didn't hit a course marker.

Originally Posted by Russic

I'd much rather the money go to something a little more useful to the Canadian public. I just don't understand what return we get on this investment. Even if we came home with 25 gold medals I'd still question how useful that is to us as a country.

So much government funding ends up going to special interest groups that I really can't be that upset about it as far as calling it a waste of money goes. At least Olympic athletes are a special interest group that I can watch on TV.

Originally Posted by TSN

Canada started the "Road To Excellence" program to help Canada finish in the top 16 at these Games - and the top 12 in 2012. The program will have $20 million to work with in 2008-09, $28 million the following year and $36 million for each of the two years heading into 2012.
The trick is, you have to get results in order to get funding. Trupish said that's backwards.
"We're saying 'give us funding and we can produce' and the government is saying 'produce and then we'll give you funding,"' Trupish said. "It's kind of the egg before the chicken.

I think he means they the cart before the horse, but he's got a valid point. Asking athletes to produce first doesn't make sense... they're just supposed to get there by themselves?

The price of gold, silver or bronze

On the basis of the authors' calculations, it is possible to work out how much it would cost to perform better at the Olympics. Although there are certain anomalies - notably impoverished but sporty Romania - rich countries always perform best.

The Olympics, it seems, is an expensive business: to send an extra competitor, a country has to increase its GDP per head by $260.


An extra medal costs $1,700, and a gold $4,750, in terms of per-capita wealth. The richer the country, the cheaper the marginal cost of improvement: Poland would have to spend four times as much per head as would the US, in order to boost its presence at the games

That's not really relevant to this debate. Those aren't direct costs, just a correlation between GDP per capita and Olympic success. Nobody is arguing that we shouldn't increase our GDP/capita. If those were the actual costs, competing in the Olympics would likely not be worth it.

Originally Posted by Frequitude

There are hundreds of other things our government spends money on that are way more useless than the olympics. You want the government to cut out frivolous spending, target those, not the olympics.

$1B gun registry + $100 million for Olympics + $many billions for health care
<<<
$200 million for olympics + $(many plus 0.9) billion for health care


...and saying that $0 for Olympics + $(many plus 1.1)B for health care would be even better makes me feel extra shame.

I agree with you. And here again I'd also like to reintroduce CP to the concept of decreasing marginal returns. Just because the 10 million we spend on health care has a way bigger return on investment than the 10 million we spend on the Olympics doesn't mean the last 10 million you spend health care will have the same effect. It's a concept of economics whereby the more you spend on something the less you get out of each additional dollar. It's why even though you may consider your housing more important that your transportation you'll still spend money on both. There an optimum split. Likewise, there's an optimum split for the government money, you don't put it all into one thing because it's deemed "more important". Just so nobody thinks I'm contradicting myself, there are things where the marginal benefits from even the first dollar you spend on something doesn't match the benefits of the last dollar you're spending, but I wouldn't put the Olympics in that category. Some of you might, and that would be fair. But the argument that "healthcare is more important than the Olympics so we shouldn't fund them" is fallacious and disingenious at best.



As an aside, are there any women in gymnastics? They might as well just call it girls' gymnastics.