Dinner With The Namibians – Guest Olympic Post From Rohit Bhargava

When I boarded my flight to Beijing, I didn’t have a single ticket for any Olympic events and I wasn’t worried. To understand why, I need to tell you about my best day during the Summer Olympics in Sydney in 2000. I was living there and had one night where I was heading out to see a Handball match (by far my favourite Olympic sport, by the way). I got two tickets last minute and knew nothing about the sport. When I turned up, I was surprised to learn that the sport is basically a cross between soccer with your hands and water polo without the water. It is fast, challenging, and amazingly fun to watch. I discovered a new sport that day, but that wasn’t even the most memorable part of the day. Right after, I managed to get a table at famous S-shaped bar at the one hotel which was at Homebush Bay (the main Olympic Area) outside of Sydney. At the table, we sat with several athletes from different countries including an Eastern European gymnast and an African track and field athlete. I don’t remember their names, or even what we talked about … only that it was one of the most authentic and powerful Olympic experiences I could imagine. And it wasn’t about watching an athlete break a record or win a medal. It was a quiet moment at a shared table over a bottle of wine talking to two athletes who were considered the best in their countries in their respective sports.

So when I headed to Beijing, it was not with the goal of getting tickets to lots of events. It was about finding a moment where I could share a real story and an authentic Olympic moment with an athlete. Last night we had a chance to have a moment like that as part of a blogger meetup we organized over Twitter for a few local bloggers in Beijing and some of our athletes participating in the Lenovo program. We ended up having dinner with two Namibian cyclists, both of whom were competing for their country – Mannie in Mountain Biking and Eric Hoffman in Road Cycling. As we sat there and listened to their stories of making it past the trials and what it took to be the ones their country sent, it was easy to remember why the Olympics are the most powerful global event in the world.

Mannie competes on the second to last day of the Games, but talking to Eric was a great reminder of just how much every athlete trains and struggles just to be part of the Games, and how proud thousands of people none of us can see will be of them when they return home. Eric realized a personal best and finished 22 out of more than 100 of the finest road cyclers in the world after riding for over six hours. This is what the Olympics are really about. Not the hurdler who conquers personal tragedy and cancer of the kneecap to win the Gold. That’s the Hollywood version. The real life story is about the guy who beats his one biggest competitor to be the sole athlete in his sport that his country sends to Beijing. The one who misses marching in the Opening Ceremonies to rest so he can compete at 9am on the first day of the Olympics. The one who rides his bike in hot and humid weather for more than six hours among the best cyclists in the world. And the one who beats the odds to finish a personal best of 22nd so that he can go home a hero.

To read more real athlete’s stories, visit Lenovo’s Voices of the Olympic Games (link to http://summergames.lenovo.com)

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The economics of Olympics

It is arguable if the economy of a host country benefits from Olympics….. some data says yes.

It is widely assumed that the Olympics Games have a broad economic impact and that the Games have an unequivocally positive effect on the host country and city. More and more cities are now coming forward as Olympic bidders. The macroeconomic impact of a summer Olympic Games is assumed to be over US$5 billion. The direct impact of investment and visitation is clear if short-term. The broader image benefits would be proven in the longer term: providing a platform for a nation’s corporations to excel and providing a showcase for a city region to attract inward investors.

One way to address this question is to see if other host countries have experienced increases in GDP around Olympic years. Below is a graph of one measure of the boost to GDP that countries receive from hosting the Olympics. (Each point represents the average, over all of the host countries since 1952, rate of growth of GDP in the host country less the 12 year average for that country.)

What this graph suggests is that prior to the Olympics and during the Olympic year GDP growth is higher than average – maximising out at nearly 1.5% above average GDP in the 3rd year before the Olympics. (This number seems consistent with the estimates for Sydney – at least prior to the Olympic year.) However, the graph also suggests that growth rates are lower in the years after the Olympics, than in the years prior.

This data is only suggestive. There is a vide range of economic experiences across countries and the deviations from the mean rate of growth in the graph are most likely not statistically significant. A careful analysis of the data would take into account a wider range of economic data – both in type and in time periods – and would much more careful about the statistical inference. Anybody want to run a VAR and test for a structural break? Source: Data from IMF, Penn World Tables v5.6.

The economics of winning

From BBC we get, after crunching data from five decades of Olympics, two Harvard economists have deduced that cold countries perform better than hot ones in the winter games, and that large states produce more athletes than their smaller neighbours. (No surprise there I could have told you this without any crunching)

Number-crunching

Arguably the most interesting parts of their paper are the incidental statistical trivia thrown up by burrowing through five decades of Olympic data.

· Out of all the 241 countries in the Olympic family, fewer than half have ever won a medal of any kind at either the winter or summer games.

· Despite their success at track and field events, all African nations combined still accounted for less than 2% of the total medals haul at the Sydney Olympics.

· On average, there are 9-13 competitors for every Olympic medal awarded; the best chance of winning, however, was enjoyed in 1956-60, when there were a record low of only 6.5 athletes for each gong.

· The countries most disproportionately represented at Olympics – in terms of the number of athletes per head of population – are the Seychelles in summer, and Iceland in winter.

· Rich countries send proportionally more female competitors than poor ones: for every extra $1,000 of GDP, the average nation sends an extra two female athletes.

WSJ reports PricewaterhouseCoopers released a study that estimates China will win 88 medals during the Games this August, followed by the U.S. with 87 and Russia with 79.

Read on Update on the medal tally here https://moneymanagement.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&post=124

However, the report’s author, PWC’s London-based Head of Macroeconomics John Hawksworth, is quick to point out that China and the U.S. are “basically neck and neck” in competition for the top spot.  So we can watch out and compare if what the economist suggest makes sense or are there going to be some surprises thrown our way.

To read more about the Beijing Olympics click http://en.beijing2008.cn/