By Braden Keith on SwimSwam
Sunday evening was a global whirlwind of conversation about the opening edition of the Enhanced Games – which turned out to be mostly an infomercial parading as a sporting spectacle.
There was an immense amount of conversation had about the Games, much of it critical of principle and performance and structure, and some supportive of the ideas as well.
I don’t think I have much interesting to say that hasn’t been said about all of those things.
Read more in the comments of the Enhanced Games Live Recap.But the one part of this that is stuck in my craw is the repeated crowing about the money that athletes were paid, and how that proved the moral superiority of the Enhanced Games.
Where that misses the point is that the Enhanced Games didn’t actually solve the financial problems that plague sports like swimming, track & field, and weightlifting.
What I mean is this: while the billionaires and large capital funds backing the event were generous in a sense in their donations to athletes who submitted to the experiment, on the outside there is no way that the Games as a standalone product were profitable. Between the huge marketing costs, venue construction, the training camp in Abu Dhabi, staff, and everything else that went into the Games, whatever sponsorships were sold or ticket revenue was present from an often-meager crowd or YouTube streaming revenue was earned from the event seems unlikely to have even come close to covering the costs of staging the event.
At this point, I assume most of our readers understand that the Games themselves were not designed to be profitable, but instead as a high visibility marketing product for ‘the Protocol,’ which the founders hope will generate billions of dollars of revenue for the company.
But that also means that Cody Miller leaving with $500,000 or Hunter Armstrong leaving with $375,000 doesn’t actually mean that they have cracked the code.
So setting aside the fact that the repeated pitch of ‘removing financial stress from athletes helps them perform at their best’ didn’t really bare itself out (it’s not clear that they did), the Enhanced Games didn’t prove anything about a better way to do Olympic sports.
They didn’t prove that paying past-their-prime athletes millions of dollars is sustainable for the IOC or World Aquatics or USA Swimming. They didn’t create any novel presentation or format (6 hour swim meets are the problem, not the solution). There are no takeaways for anybody in the hallowed halls to even say ‘we hate the doping but they did do this really cool pre-race thing, we should steal that idea.’ No silver linings to the sideshow.
What they did, essentially, was donate a bunch of money to the athletes to try and force a point and grab a moral high ground. Peter Thiel could’ve written $250,000 checks to each Olympic gold medalist too. He just chose to do it for Enhanced Games winners instead.
I’m happy for what that money means to the athletes and their families. Truly. Another million dollars for Kristian Gkolomeev is a life changing sum.
But it is not a sport-changing sum because it is not analogous. It’s like saying “Apple made $100 billion last year, why can’t USA Swimming pay their athletes more?”
They’re not actually in the same business.
And so the one part of the Enhanced Games that actually could have enhanced the sport of swimming has fallen flat. The conversation hasn’t changed about what swimming needs to do in order to have more commercial success. We need to find more exciting formats, athletes need to be more accessible and marketable, the powers that be need to sell more ads, and around that circle it goes in time until one day (hopefully) the sport finds a way to pay athletes more.
It was a small handful of events and a small handful of athletes and did not, in itself, create a pathway for sustained or widespread financial success.
While the Enhanced Games pushed itself as the solution to all of the financial shortcomings of these Olympic sports, the Enhanced Games don’t actually care if pro swimmers make more money. That’s where this event differs from the International Swimming League, another event bankrolled by a controversial billionaire that was wildly unsustainable. In the case of the ISL, I truly believe that Konstantin Grigorishin wanted to create a pathway for pro swimmers to make more money.
But paying 30-something swimmers gobs of money to swim times that are not particularly fast across a brutal 6 hour format didn’t prove anything. It didn’t prove that the protocols work, it didn’t prove that the sports had been revolutionized, it didn’t prove that swimmers should be paid more than they are.
So above all things, that’s what I really hated about last night. The needle hasn’t moved one bit on the ‘real’ side of this conversation, but the conversation has been dumbed down to “the Enhanced Games can do it so you should too.”
Read the full story on SwimSwam: The Enhanced Games Didn’t Really Teach Us Anything About the Troubled Economics of Olympic Sports
Hence then, the article about the enhanced games didn t really teach us anything about the troubled economics of olympic sports was published today ( ) and is available on swimswam ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( The Enhanced Games Didn’t Really Teach Us Anything About the Troubled Economics of Olympic Sports )
Also on site :