The Olympic Sports Games Events!

Welcome, Corinthian reader, as I take you on a journey to the Olympic Games through the eyes of our American cousins. There's a very different view of these games here to the one we're used to in Europe, and it provides some interesting insights into the general American attitude to sport. Or sports, if you speak the local lingo.

Obviously the British attitude to sport is very much that Corinthian ideal. It's about turning up and playing the game and enjoying the contest. So much the better if you're a plucky amateur with no "team" to speak of; if you unexpectedly sneak a medal, that's a huge bonus. Hell, in Britain we'll love you if you finish 10th if that's the best we've ever done (which is what happened to Jessica Gadirova in the women's gymnastics this week). Even on those rare occasions where we have great champions, we're pretty good at knowing they're unvarnished human beings (I'm looking at you, Steve Redgrave) and we hope they will continue to succeed, rather than expecting.

The American attitude is much more about winning. Not winning is bad; not winning when the Russians or the Chinese win is even worse, because obviously McCarthyism is still a thing. A sport where the US team is going to win will get a lot of coverage (so this week we're seeing plenty of water polo); one where they don't win is unlikely to get a look-in. Perhaps the most hilarious of all is that the US media count the medals differently to the rest of the world, in a way which unsurprisingly results in the US coming out on top:

Don't look at the count of Golds!

The rest of the world, of course, counts the medals another way:

Now it's nice to poke fun at the inherent insecurity which appears to drive our American media to behave like this, but it also turned somewhat serious this week. In the qualifying round for the women's team gymnastics, the US team committed the sin of only finishing second. Now this is irrelevant you might say; it's only qualifying, no medals for qualifying. How very adult of you!

On NBC we were treated to the unedifying spectacle of a Peter Snow-like figure pointing at a display to indicate precisely where the US team had "under-performed" against their average scores, and precisely which members of the team needed to "step up" if they were going to win the expected gold. Helen and I had a somewhat concerned conversation about how this level of criticism wasn't exactly constructive. In fact it felt entirely the opposite, with pressure being heaped on very young athletes by those who couldn't even dream of emulating their achievements.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the next day, star athlete Simone Biles pulled out of the competition citing mental health problems.

There is a very obvious and serious lesson here. In the UK there's a prevailing feeling that champions don't get the respect they deserve; as a nation we empathise a lot less with effortless victory than with heroic failure. But that also gives our admittedly much rarer champions a latitude and a freedom to perform (or indeed, heroically fail) which the US simply doesn't provide. In the UK we tend to talk about organizational failings when we don't do well, not single out under-performing athletes.

To give them their due, the US broadcasters also seem genuinely pleased when the UK wins medals. Obviously that fits the anyone-but-Russia-and-China narrative, but it's nice to see. Imagine, folks, if only you'd paid your taxes, we could have been far ahead on this medal table, not just your gerrymandered medal count!