Hello and welcome to another edition of Free Agent! Don’t be afraid to make a big sports prediction about something 15 years in the future — if you’re wrong, no one will care; if you’re right, you’ll look like a genius.
We’ve got a jam-packed newsletter for you all this week, covering everything from Eileen Gu to winning the medal count through economics and closing with a podcast appearance from yours truly. Somewhere in between, you’ll find the word Yukigassen. Enjoy!
Eileen Gu is an extraordinary all-American success story. She was born in San Francisco and raised by a dedicated single mother who had moved to the U.S. for a demanding postgraduate education career at Auburn, Rockefeller University, and then Stanford’s business school. Gu started skiing on the mountains towering over Lake Tahoe when she was just three years old, and won a national championship at age nine. She was fortunate enough to be educated in prestigious private schools and gained early admittance to Stanford, where she joined a sorority. She’s attractive and incredibly successful, enough to have a celebrated modeling career on her impressive résumé, including glamorous campaigns with iconic American brands like Victoria’s Secret and Tiffany & Co.
Yet after all the U.S. helped her accomplish, she chose to compete under the Chinese flag instead of the American one. And she can’t seem to figure out why Americans are so mad about it.
China helped Gu too, of course, with its own long list of sponsorship campaigns (including with state-owned companies) and the small matter of millions of dollars in taxpayer funds. Don’t forget the special exception she seems to have to China’s ban on dual citizenship.
Yet when Gu talks about this controversy, she’s either playing dumb or, for some reason, can’t figure out why people are mad. “So many athletes compete for a different country,” she said in response to Vice President J.D. Vance. “People only have a problem with me doing it because they kind of lump China into this monolithic entity, and they just hate China.” Gu does the same act when she’s asked about 1.5 million Uyghurs in Chinese concentration camps. “I’m not an expert on this,” she told Time magazine. “I haven’t done the research. I don’t think it’s my business.” (In an interview with Reason, one concentration camp survivor described sexual torture and other unspeakable horrors.)
For all its flaws, America is still a wonderful country. People love it here, and many foreigners want to be here. We pride ourselves on being the best at everything, because it’s feasible for America to be the best at most things. All of the American pride shown during the Olympics is a clear example of this — a pride in our athletes that unified Americans of all backgrounds (except for a few miserable libs) and ended in one of our best finishes at the Winter Olympics ever.
Of course, most people are proud of where they personally come from and where their ancestors came from. That usually has little or nothing to do with government policies (directly, anyway).
So it’s natural for Americans to feel betrayed by someone who could represent the United States but chooses not to — especially when they pick a country whose values are nearly diametrically opposed to ours. America’s freedom and wealth made Eileen Gu who she is today, not Chinese communism.
Speaking of communism, you know what makes it hard to win Olympic medals? Central planning.
“It takes experience, population, and wealth to make a successful soccer nation,” as journalist Simon Kuper and economist Stefan Szymanski wrote in the 2022 edition of their book Soccernomics (which I highly recommend). After home field advantage, they found that a long history of playing international soccer was the most predictive factor in explaining a country’s international winning percentage. The next two most important factors were income and population size. “In other words, being large and rich helps a country win matches, but having a long soccer history helps a lot more.”
It’s reasonable to think those factors apply to most other sports, too (though perhaps at differing rates for each variable). The emphasis on experience is probably a proxy for local interest in specific sports as well as expertise in training, coaching, and innovation (such as “crotchgate”). That explains how Norway, population 5.7 million, can win more medals than the United States, which has 60 times as many people. As I pointed out last week, the distribution of those medals across various sports probably helps Norway pad the medal count too.
In addition to their long soccer histories, one thing that Europe has over American soccer is a localized network that’s constantly exchanging ideas. In soccer, America is missing out on the best hub of information. In other sports, our wealth and history have probably helped to ensure that their respective hubs are placed in America — a large, prosperous country where networks can thrive in metropolises that are easily connected by highways and airports. (For example, almost every time I watch a Detroit Red Wings game, the announcers point out that some player or coach on the other team grew up in the Detroit area, or participated in USA Hockey’s National Team Development Program that’s based in the suburbs, or played college hockey in Michigan).
As I wrote back in August, there’s another thing that’s unique about America’s Olympic success (besides all the winning): a lack of taxpayer funding. “Our fruited plains (or our populous cities and economic system) are perfect for the development of freaks of nature like Simone Biles, Noah Lyles, and Michael Phelps,” I wrote. Taxpayer funding might create an Olympic system of political favor-trading, where the athletes with the best potential get pushed aside for the athletes with the best political connections. Important decisions behind coaching and rosters might get tainted by political considerations. “Do we really need coaches hauled in front of Congress to explain why Caitlin Clark didn’t make the team? Executive branch inquiries into tactical decisions and training regimens? Political favor-trading so that someone’s favorite breakdancer or donor’s niece can make the roster?”
Freedom, not central planning, is the way to success — in sports and economics.
I have to say, when I asked you all for ideas on how to fix the Olympics, I did not expect so much hatred for them. But almost a quarter of the people who responded said something like “Get rid of them” or “Get rid of it completely.” None of those responses expanded on that thought, so I’m left wondering why they’d rather cancel the Olympics instead of just ignoring them.
Thankfully, those of you with more constructive ideas kept it interesting.
Several of you want to have the Olympics in a permanent location. As one of you suggested, “You can still have a nation act as the ‘host’ with cultural displays and things like that, but the physical locations should not change.” No one suggested where to do that, but Western Europe makes sense given the quality of the facilities and how the time zones work fairly well for the rest of the world. My crazy idea, though, is for a worldwide Olympics: Host rugby in Australia, table tennis in Japan, the track and field events in South Africa, the marathon in London, soccer in Brazil, and swimming in Los Angeles. Most people are watching on TV anyway, and then we get to watch the Olympics all day long. (I also wouldn’t mind having the events spread out over more than two weeks, so it’s easier to pay attention to more events.)
Another popular idea that several of you suggested was splitting up the subjective sports into a new category, including sports where judges are the primary determinants of the winner, such as gymnastics and figure skating. One of you even suggested giving those sports their own separate Olympics.
Lastly, what about new sports? I’m fully on board with the person who suggested adding dog sled racing, snowshoe racing, and Yukigassen (an organized form of snowball fighting that was invented in Japan in the 1980s). Someone else called for ultimate frisbee to be added to the Summer Olympics (probably my colleague Phillip Bader), and someone who said lacrosse sixes isn’t good enough and that the 10 on 10 version needs to be in the Olympics instead. One of you is fully embracing the “root for chaos” mentality, suggesting that biathlon should be a James Bond-esque ski hunt and that figure skating should have four groups performing at the same time, trying to avoid hitting each other.
And at least one of you is probably looking forward to the Enhanced Games this May, considering your simple response: “Allow doping.”
Lastly, I was surprised to see two-thirds of you prefer ranking countries by total medals instead of gold medals. I thought more of a “Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing” mentality would prevail among my American readers. Fortunately, the official count doesn’t matter (in the sense that the Olympics doesn’t name the country with the most medals that year’s overall “winner”) so we can play around and create our own medal tables based on various factors, as The New York Times’ Ben Blatt did. (The Summer Olympics version was even wonkier.)
On Friday, I joined my fellow Michigander Robby Soave on Reason’s Freed Up podcast to talk about tariffs, the Olympics, Gu, Stephen A. Smith possibly running for president, and a very weird list of other topics, including way too much detail on high school cross country running in Michigan. It was fun to record, so I hope you’ll watch the whole thing and leave a million comments that say Reason should have its own sports podcast with similarly nonexistent levels of preparation (if only so I can show off more obscure sports attire).
Beating other countries at weird sports that they’ve made up is a great American pastime. Did your country invent a sport where people strap blades onto their feet, glide around on ice, and try to use a stick to hit a rubber circle into a net surrounded by metal tubes? Great, our professional teams will keep your professional teams from winning the championship for at least 32 years, and one day our players, men and women, will beat your players at the Olympics. (By the way, we’ll get more than twice as many gold medals as your country, even though your country is colder and snowier.)
We’ve had the newsletter going for almost a year, and I think these are my favorite replays so far.
That’s all for this week. Enjoy watching the real game of the weekend, West Virginia against Kennesaw State on Saturday in college baseball, which is already somehow in its second week of the season.
