I know I know I know. You’re tired of Olympics stories. This week alone I hit you with:
- The Six Worst Olympic Events Explained With Economics
- What Are Communists Trying To Prove?
- Why You Aren’t Seeing Michael Phelps In Subway Commercials
- The Medal’s Metal
this week alone. So instead of bombarding you with more useless dribble from my fingertips I’ll give you the best from others digits.
The Olympics and Economics 2012 courtesy of Goldman Sachs by way of my pal Jodi Beggs: This report is full of all kinds of useless information about the Olympics but should give you plenty of conversation starters over the weekend and into next week. Useless nuggets like: the host nation on average has a 54% lift in medals won, the high correlation with a country’s GDP to the number of medals they win, measuring the impact of hosting the Olympics on housing prices, and what domestic stock markets do when Olympic hosts are announced. There’s a lot of pages but this is easy to skim and read headlines.
The Olympics and the Doctors: Being the pinnacle of sports for 99% of the athletes in the games, the Olympics no doubt bring out the worst in some people and they cheat. If you were an Olympian, and could pick one time to use performance enhancing drugs (PEDs) without getting caught you’d use them at the Olympics. We like to pretend that we have good screening for drugs. But we’re only screening for things we know exist. There’s no telling what people have come up with to avoid getting caught. Either it’s a new drug that doesn’t show up, or an elaborate method to avoid getting caught. I like to believe Lance Armstrong is innocent, but he’s been accused of a conspiracy that includes fake bus breakdowns to pump out doped blood and replace with his own blood from 6 months prior. Behind the arms race are doctors. Not all doctors, just enough to make it scary.
Science, Sex, and the Olympics: A very interesting look at the role gender plays in the Olympics. Modern science has revealed that gender is more of a spectrum than a black and white definition. So how do we segregate those predominately stronger with those predominately weaker. One suggestion is to differentiate on testosterone levels which does have a correlation. This article doesn’t favor that idea however it doesn’t offer other solutions at all. Quite honestly, much of it is over my head but it’s good reading.
Who Pays for the Olympics? Okay I couldn’t help but include one more post from me. But it was written 4 years ago and explains how the Olympics get paid for, and who is providing all the support to our Olympians. You know you want to know and unless you were one of the 8 years I had in 2008 this will be new to you.
 By The Weakonomist |
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