While thinking about the Summer Olympics earlier today, I pulled up this Wikipedia list of Olympians who have won multiple medals. The thing that I find most striking about the list is that the majority of multiple medal winners are Summer competitors, especially at the top of the list where the top nine and 17 of the top 18 compete in the Summer games. A huge reason for this is that the Summer games include a bunch of "sports" where athletes can pile up a number of medals in a single Olympics. Swimming, gymnastics and "athletics" (track and field) are each made up of numerous events, many of which are so similar that an athlete can be world class in virtually all of them.
When Michael Phelps swam to eight gold medals in 2008 in Beijing and collected his 22nd career Olympic medal this year in London, it was certainly an exciting story to follow. But while Phelps is an incredible athlete and unquestionably the best swimmer of all time, his quest to break the record for most individual medals was greatly helped by the fact that he competes in a sport where he can compete in seven or eight events every four years. Perhaps in the mind of a competitive swimmer the 100m and 200m butterfly are drastically different events, but on the grand scheme of things they're essentially the same exact competition. It makes sense that the fastest guy in the 100m is probably pretty good at the 200m, too, and thus Phelps gets rewarded twice for the same basic skill.
While I would argue that there's more differentiation between the 100m freestyle and the 100m butterfly than there is between two races of the same stroke but different distances, even those events are fairly similar. The fact is that someone who is great at swimming is just plan great at swimming, regardless of the stroke they're using. We see this not only in swimming but in sprinting, too, where athletes regularly collect numerous medals in a single Olympics. As I watch the 2012 games, I find myself wondering if all of these various swimming, gymnastics and track and field events are "different enough" that we should be allowing the same athletes to compete in all of them.
I understand that there's a lot of tradition behind having a 100m, a 200m and a 400m sprint, but I personally don't really enjoy watching the same runners compete is virtually all of them. Wouldn't it be more interesting if athletes were restricted to selecting one or two events per Olympics? In my mind, this would accomplish a few things to benefit of the Summer Olympics. One, it would open the games up to more athletes, giving the world more interesting backstories and personalities. Two, it would force athletes to really focus of one or two specific competitions, encouraging them to perfect their craft in these events rather than trying to spread themselves over an entire sport. Third, it would really raise the bar for the quality of competition - with each athlete giving their all in every race without being worried about saving something in the tank, we'd be sure to see even more incredible record-breaking performances.
I have a lot of respect for Phelps, Carl Lewis and all of the other famous Olympians known for competing in a wide range of events. But it doesn't make sense to me why Michael Phelps can earn eight medals in one Olympics for a few minutes of swimming while Andy Murray can only earn one medal for playing hours of tennis. In order to put all of our athletes on more equal footing, I'd like to see athletes restricted to competing in their best one or two events. We might lose the next Michael Phelps, but we'd gain a bunch of new awe-inspiring performances and add a host of new, talented athletes to the mix.
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