Why do some sports in the Olympics have so many different variations with the same athletes repeatedly getting the same medals?
Like swimming, rowing, and running where there are like 100 meters, 200 meters, 400 meters, team relay, etc. etc. If you notice it's always the same athletes winning the medals for these events so you have someone like Michael Phelps of USA winning 4-7 gold medals for practically the same sport.
I also noticed that the sports that are like this are the sports where the US (and the West in general) leads the world in the number of medals. Is this just a coincidence?
I mean why can't we have the same variations for other sports like freestyle wrestling of 1 minute, 2 minutes, 4 minutes, team wrestling, etc? So Iran can bring in 20 medals instead of the usual 4-6?
The way the Olympics is set up right now, it's heavily biased toward countries that are better in certain sports like swimming, rowing, and running (i.e. western countries). They can correct it by disallowing the same athlete to compete in the different variations of the same sport.
Also there are some really specialized and uncommon sports that are practically variations of other sports dominated by the West like Trampoline (Another version of Gymnastics), Rhythmic Gymnastics (Another version of Gymnastics), Modern Pentathlon, Baseball, Softball (Another Baseball), etc. And yet there is no Futsal (More popular than all of those other sports combined) but dominated by non-western countries.
Thoughts?
Like swimming, rowing, and running where there are like 100 meters, 200 meters, 400 meters, team relay, etc. etc. If you notice it's always the same athletes winning the medals for these events so you have someone like Michael Phelps of USA winning 4-7 gold medals for practically the same sport.
I also noticed that the sports that are like this are the sports where the US (and the West in general) leads the world in the number of medals. Is this just a coincidence?
I mean why can't we have the same variations for other sports like freestyle wrestling of 1 minute, 2 minutes, 4 minutes, team wrestling, etc? So Iran can bring in 20 medals instead of the usual 4-6?
The way the Olympics is set up right now, it's heavily biased toward countries that are better in certain sports like swimming, rowing, and running (i.e. western countries). They can correct it by disallowing the same athlete to compete in the different variations of the same sport.
Also there are some really specialized and uncommon sports that are practically variations of other sports dominated by the West like Trampoline (Another version of Gymnastics), Rhythmic Gymnastics (Another version of Gymnastics), Modern Pentathlon, Baseball, Softball (Another Baseball), etc. And yet there is no Futsal (More popular than all of those other sports combined) but dominated by non-western countries.
Thoughts?
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