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William Watson: Olympics need to deal with rampant medal inflation

Over two and half times more medals were handed out in Milano-Cortina than in Calgary in 1988. The IOC must start cutting events

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Did you watch much of the Winter Ozempics? I’m sorry: I mean the Winter Olympics. There were so many Ozempic commercials it’s a natural confusion. 

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They’re charmingly vague, the Ozempic commercials. That’s because Health Canada forbids advertising that makes therapeutic claims. So they can’t actually tell you what their product is for, they can only mention its name and direct you to your doctor — which for some reason they assume you have, though one in five Canadians doesn’t.

The whole world now knows about Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro, semaglutides that help with weight loss and maybe other good things, too. The New York Times called semaglutide a “miracle drug.” But here in the backwoods people selling it still have to pretend we’ve never heard of it. 

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Anyway, watching Ozempic ads during the Olympics got me thinking the Olympics itself could do with some slimming down. So I checked the numbers. In the Calgary Winter Olympics in 1988, a total of 138 medals were given out in 46 events. In Milano-Cortina the total was 348, for 116 events. The number of events and medals is more than two and half times what it was. 

As inflation goes, that’s even worse than the Bank of Canada’s inflation “control” over the same period. The Bank’s inflation calculator shows that what cost $100 in 1988 costs “only” $236.73 now. In fairness to the International Olympic Committee, it has done better than the Fed and the Bank of England. In the United States and United Kingdom what cost 100 in 1988 cost 280.39 and 280.99, respectively, now.  

The main reason for such rapid medal inflation is the introduction of new sports: curling (three gold medals), freestyle skiing (15), short-track skating (nine), snowboard (11), skeleton (three) and, this year, ski mountaineering, which handed out three golds but got lousy reviews so may not be back. Are U.S. TV viewers really as taken with snowboarding as U.S. TV producers evidently believe?

Other new events are because women were finally allowed in. That doubled the number of medals for hockey, which used to have only men’s but now has women’s, too. (Great game against the U.S., ladies!) In 1988 ski jumping was also men-only, but now women compete on both the “large” and “normal” hills — as if there were anything remotely “normal” about sliding down a roller-coaster ramp and launching yourself, at high speed, off any-sized ski jump. There’s now also a “mixed team” event. (Personally, I think they should have to go off holding hands.) 

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Other traditional sports have simply expanded. Biathlon (skiing and shooting) was three male-only events but is now 11 mixed. It used to seem quaint but, what with Greenland and Putin’s arctic ambitions, maybe winter warfare skills do need encouragement. Could we maybe work some winter tank play into the program? Bobsleigh used to be just two-man and four-man but has added two-woman and “monobob” (one-woman), so has also doubled its medals. 

Cross-country skiing was eight events but is now 13. No wonder Norway cleans up! Canada needs to lobby for more hockey events. Mixed teams. Separate three-on-three tournaments for both men and women. Checking and no-checking tournaments (like “classic” and “freestyle” cross-country). And skills competitions, lots of them. I’d love to see Tom Wilson take a run at a crash-test dummy loaded with impact sensors. With some imagination it should be possible to get the hockey medal count up to at least a dozen gold. 

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The proliferation of “team” events is also a problem. Hockey really is a team game. Downhill skiing isn’t, though it now has a “team combined,” in which the times of two different skiers in different events are added together. Same with figure skating, ski jumping and skeleton: the “team” competition is just aggregated individual competitions. It could all be handled by a calculator.  

The 21 medals Canada won in Italy are obviously more than the five we managed in Calgary in 1988. But if you eliminate all the new sports, this year’s haul was only eight — one in figure skating, two in hockey and five in long-track speed skating. And three of those were in new events in the old sports: women’s hockey and, in speed skating, women’s team pursuit and women’s mass start. 

So, controlling for medal inflation, Canada’s medal count in Milano-Cortina was five, exactly the same as in Calgary — and also without a gold medal.  

I realize that applying the appropriate medal deflators in this way feeds into the storyline of Canadian Olympic officials, who closed out the Games, as they always do, by asking for more money. (If we’ve done poorly, it’s because we haven’t been spending enough, while if we’ve done well, imagine what we could do with even more money!)

But what justifies government involvement? I suspect Canadians care most about hockey but it’s pretty much self-financed by the enthusiastic multi-millionaire volunteers we saw playing on Sunday, and by the not so well paid but nevertheless now mainly professional women players who took the silver. 

Is it “soft power” that public subsidies are after? Only 29 countries won medals in Italy. Does anyone think ill of the 180-plus that didn’t? If you really enjoy any of the sports, by all means donate to its organization and help it out. But public subsidy? The only potentially public good is the hard-power winter combat skill of the biathletes. 

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