This House Would...
This House Would...
EP3: Nationalizing Olympic training.
In this new format here at THW, Noah, Heather, and Eric sit down on a Saturday morning to talk about a variety of debate topics. This month, we prepare and discuss motions on the Olympics, Olympic athletes, and their relations to common problems in today's world. Today, for the last episode of this series, we dive into the lesser talked about part of the Olympics - the welfare of athletes before and after participating in the Games and the differences between athlete training programs across the world.
Credits:
Hosts: Noah Pinno, Heather Yuan, Eric Jiang
Editor: Eric Jiang
Cover Art: @onlyooh_
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Do you have a suggestion for a topic you would like to hear about? Feedback on how we can improve? Let us know by emailing us at thwdebatepodcast@gmail.com
Okay, hi, everyone. Welcome back to this episode of th w debate podcast. We are so excited to continue on with our category of topics this month, which is once again related to the Olympics. Today in the studio of th W, we have Eric and Noah in front of me, hey, it was a very long dragged out. Hey, and today the topic in front of us is this House believes that governments should directly manage Olympic athlete training. So with that topic, let's look at what are the things we have to talk about and to cover in regards to this motion? We're first going to go through a brief breakdown of why this motion even exists, why should we care about it? And then we're going to talk about specifically what are the government's roles they have in training of Olympic athletes, before going into breaking down the areas of clash for this topic, specifically? So in particular, for this topic, we are inspired by cases, the recent case regarding USA Gymnastics, China's Olympic Training Program, Russians doping scandal, and the Bible version athlete who is currently or had thought, asylum. So Noah, I'm gonna throw the mic over to you first. What do you think we should first start off thinking about when we get this motion?
Noah Pinno:So the good thing about this motion is that the wording is pretty straightforward. It's this House believes that, which means we don't have anything funky to do with the past tense, like in previous debates. But in my opinion, the thing that makes this motion most interesting is that it seems to be a very general, but strong policy. But what it actually looks like is not exactly defined when you just read the motion. So for that reason, I think that the best way to understand how you debate this motion, or why this motion as this flexibility, is a 32 an essay question. So I'm sure most of you who are listening have at some point written an essay that starts with To what extent? So let's say we took this topic, to what extent should governments be involved in training Olympic athletes. Now in any To what extent essay, you always want to take a clear stance for one side or the other, you want to avoid middle grounds anyways. But the part of the essay that's interesting is, it's up to you to decide how far you take your stance, how far you take, what you're defining what things you would include if you're making a change. And it's very much the same in this debate, right? To what extent invites you to outline which policies IE which extent and set your own terms for the essay. So in this debate round, it is really up to government to decide the extent to which governments should directly manage Olympic athlete training. And what that looks like in practice is going to be a model that outlines some of the policies that are more specific that they include. Now, of course, the reason you'd want to do this is many reasons. Firstly, and most importantly, if you guys never define or agree upon what directly managing actually entails, no team is going to have mechanisms that are actually specific enough, right. So you can have detail without knowing what actually changes on the ground. But I think the other reason that this is really important is that government decides how far from status quo, the debate is taking place, at least how far from the status quo compared to maybe Canada or the US or many Western liberal democracies that usually do not have strong government management of their Olympic athlete teams. So because government decides the extent meaning how far from the status quo, that also means that they decide their own burden. And that's something really interesting about this round is government has a lot of freedom to decide how big or small what their burden is, it's not like this sense of regrets where they have to show that the other world would have been better, or they have to prove what they think the counterfactual would be. Instead, in this round, it's really up to gov to decide the margins for the debate. Now, as an opposition team, you would have to keep this in the back of your mind not knowing exactly which policies are are not included. And you may have to come up with some mechanisms on the fly in all honesty, but fortunately, if government takes a very low burden, you could always call them up for that. So you can point out that most of the changes they're doing are really not that different from how things are right now. And that is kind of a meta debate. A separate class, we won't spend too much time on it, but it is something in the round, that you should be looking out for his opposition.
Heather Yuan:So besides looking at from a sliding scale perspective, what the change will be and like we just talked about will be defined by government. I think overall In this debate and to start off with any PrEP is to always a good way to ground yourself is to think about the different stakeholders. In the case of today's debate, I think the most obvious one is our athletes. We're talking about athletes, we're talking about future athletes, current athletes and former athletes are focusing on the training that they'll go through, when they're actually physically at the Olympics, how What does their participation look like? And then post Olympic activities for them. I think the second biggest stakeholder as well are the government. So government actors in the sense that like, what are the policies that Dell enact? What do those policies mean, then for their investment into training and building infrastructure. And then finally, generally, the general public?
Noah Pinno:Yeah, also, just something briefly on governments, I want to make a quick tie into last week, we said that it's often a good idea as a government team, to use examples of countries that you think would fit under your definition for something, you know, very fuzzy, like poor human rights records. So you can definitely do the same here. Since we know that governments are going to be stakeholders, you can use examples of government for either side. So for example, you would say that the United States is an example of a country that has little national direction of their Olympic teams, whereas China has pretty heavy direction of Olympic teams.
Eric Jiang:And I want to elaborate on that, too, because you mentioned how each governor had different controlling mechanisms on how their athlete goes through the pipeline of national training. And so I'll just give some context for what it is now, the you mentioned that the USA is more of the type that doesn't really control. And I do want to clarify that they do have national certification of their athlete trainers, the APC program, or the ATC program. However, that is pretty much the extent of regulatory oversight. Whereas China, they build stadiums dedicated for naval stadiums, they build training centers dedicated towards Olympic Training, they I believe they have 150 ish National Training Centers dedicated to putting young kids through this pipeline, and they hire like 1000s and 1000s of trainers and workers, whereas the US takes a very laissez faire approach to it.
Heather Yuan:And I think that brings us to our second question in this motion in this motion breakdown section. So what role should government's have then in training Olympic athletes?
Noah Pinno:Yeah, like if you're modeling it, what are some things that are on the table? I think that exactly what you said, Eric, there's some things that are kind of common ground that will always be done. I mean, at the minimum, every government has to officially recognize another organization. If there's no official recognition, it's not an Olympic team, right. So technically, every country has some level of national involvement, never 00. So that would be something that's that'd be something that's on the table for both teams, that you just accept as a common denominator. But you'd also have some other things that you could look at, like the training before you even make it onto the Olympic team, again, like Eric was talking about lots of schools that construct pipelines that construct training regimes for people to eventually compete. These will be examples of more heavy handed government approach. So when the government is taking a strong direction for their national team, that doesn't just mean who directly manages the Olympic team. And it can often extend to larger social policies as well. Just something to consider about when you set your own motion. Yeah.
Eric Jiang:And I think you mentioned that the training pipeline, I think that's the main thing that differentiates the state sponsored athlete training versus something that is more democratized or privatized,
Noah Pinno:I would say. So although I think there's quite a big role for sponsorship, and quite a big role of who pays the athletes, that can often lead to a lot of differences. Well, we will definitely talk more about this in our class. There's a lot of intricacies here. But I would say that, as a general rule, a national direction would try to make pay more regular across their athletes and more standardized. So that is often a feature of any national oversight of really anything, but especially sports will be to be standardizing the process in some way.
Eric Jiang:But also, I think there's one thing that is also missing, where it's the post Korea or other means of funding other than just the state paying them a salary for a lot of these Western countries. How our programs are structured is that the pay for athletes, a lot of it comes from media sponsorships, and like public appearances, and a company like private sponsorships, whereas at least at least in the training phase, or the amateur phase or the semi professional phase for these state sponsored athletes. The funding comes from the state the training, the cost of coaches, physical therapists and mental psychiatrists. These resources all come from the state where For semi professional athletes, amateur athletes, a lot of them are actually professionals in their own right. Right. They have other jobs they have, they have to self fund their athlete career.
Noah Pinno:Exactly. I think one final thing that you could point out for major differences between the two systems. I don't know if this really falls under your model, but legal accountability for any disputes, such as injury, like working hours, any complaints against your coaches, these differ a lot in different systems, because in one, the person who's accountable or the actor who's accountable is the government. Whereas in another system where you do not have direct management, the accountable actor would be coaches, right. So the stakeholder of who is accountable at the stakeholder for who oversees this dispute is actually the same group, different branches, but the same group in nationally directed programs.
Eric Jiang:I think there's one more thing to not even just coaches, the people who are accountable for non sponsor athletes is the athletes themselves, because essentially, athletes here are their own employer. There they are individual businesses. Whereas here's the analogy of state sponsored athletes, they're more like a large corporation, they are employees of a larger Corporation, in this case, the government, they are government employees,
Noah Pinno:I definitely agree. So I want to quickly before we move on, just summarize why I think you could use these various sections as your roadmap as a government team for the policy. So looking at the motion, again, you think that governments should directly manage Olympic athlete training. So some things that are probably going to be most central or important are the fact that the government directly oversees and controls the training regimen, rather than just certifying a private actor. That might also mean the government spends a lot more resources on official training programs for people even before they get involved in athletics, they will be ultimately responsible for any disputes that appear along this wave. And as a rule, they will try to distribute pay in a way that's more standard. And that is more distributed, evenly. distributed more evenly, there we go. So those are usually the things you'd be talking about as a government team and in this debate, but even having those on the table makes the rest of the debate and the rest of the mechanisms so much more clear to you and the judge.
Heather Yuan:Yeah. So I think with all that said, that prepares us to now talk about the areas of clash that exists within this debate, I think we are off on a really good point in regards to legal accountability. Now to first talk about athlete welfare, which isn't, you know, great point to end off on, but not all sunshine, and flowers and rainbows. So going into our first area of clash, which is regarding athlete welfare, I want to break that down. I think in my head, at least, the breakdown is first talking about like the health and safety of the athletes during training. And then also talking about athletic performance. This is especially prevalent when they are on the Olympic stage, I don't know ready to do a tumble ready to do a dive and what the mental and physical pressure is on them then. But first health and safety provided during training, I think no attire off on a really good end when he talks about the legal accountability for disputes, as we're seeing now with USA Gymnastics. So firstly, under that, who has oversight and control and whether that actually has an additional layer of just monitoring to make sure that athletes can, you know, have a voice essentially, in what their training looks like and what that training program looks like.
Noah Pinno:And this is a big concern that's being brought up in the courtroom, and also in the media, which is that there was so little oversight over the coach at over the coaches behavior. And over the program itself, right. This is a common complaint against private training programs, or ones that are just nationally certified is that they do not have the same oversight, the same watchfulness and the same vertical reporting.
Heather Yuan:Yeah. And I think also if we were to then because it is an area of clash, if we were to look at it from a public lens as well, of course the the structure and the system there will be put in place, but a can we guarantee that the system itself is bulletproof. And be even if the system were to be bulletproof, does not necessarily mean that the environment that is created ends up actually doing what it's supposed to be because you didn't have an airtight system, you know, you can have all layers of management in place. But the whole system itself could be corrupt and or just could make athletes feel unsafe because of hyper competitiveness, especially when we're talking about Olympics performance. Right? So that's the second question is the environment provided by the coaches safe for I'm Larry Nasser example clearly it was not. And to a certain extent it's weird too because Larry Nasser, this whole case was really, it's not a new thing, right. It's not just coming into media attention. This has been circulating around since the previous Summer Olympics. When I think it's mckaela, Rooney mckaela Rooney, or one of the sorry, we got to cut the name because I don't want to mispronounce anyone. So this case, or Larry Nasser is treatment and the whole corruption of USA Gymnastics that was actually brought up in the previous Summer Olympics, and this was five years ago. But even to this extent, we can say like, it was so publicized that it almost looked at if this was a public event. So if we were to look at it this way, then who like has the public system then also failed the dimness despite the fact that they were in a private system.
Noah Pinno:And this is a big issue. Now, to be fair for criticizing public systems for criticizing a nationally run program, what happens when you have not only a legal body that fails to uphold athletes rights and athletes complaints, but also that may turn a blind eye to their own government doing certain abuses. So of course, like I mentioned earlier, in a nationally administered system, the stakeholder that is accountable for mistakes and that judges mistakes is the same stakeholder. The only difference is the branches of government. And that's really important when there is any corruption that is introduced to the process, especially if there is not true democratic accountability in a country, it often leads to situations where people cannot seek legal recourse against their employer because their employer is the government,
Eric Jiang:and is the guy that administers the legal recourse.
Noah Pinno:Yeah, exactly. So it requires the government to hold the government accountable. And you could see how that begins to get a bit circular. And just like you said, Heather, you we think that we can construct things with so much oversight, to make sure that we don't leave things out of the hands of the government to make sure there are no abuses. But that relies on assuming the government is actually working effectively and is not prone to corruption. We already talked about last week, how you cannot assume in debates like this, that you're just dealing with perfect democracy countries, because in fact, there is no perfect democracy country
Heather Yuan:that is tea for today. Yep. If you are listening to us, as a high schooler, who is just in debate, I'm sorry to report to you that unfortunately, there are no countries in the world. That is a perfect democracy.
Noah Pinno:So it does not real.
Eric Jiang:Yeah. Also, if this is our first episode that you're listening to, when it was said last week, that means we did a recording last week on the human rights and talking about the different countries that have human rights and how to judge rights. Just a little. Yes, yes, we may not. We may not publish that.
Heather Yuan:Okay, so yeah, I think that was a great tie in or a great summary of the health and safety provided during the training. But now let's turn our attention to athletic performance during the Olympics. I think first of all, over like an overarching theme, during the Olympics, especially the the pressure on the athletes, is how they view themselves within the context of their athletic performance. That's under very convoluted. But what that essentially means is as an athlete, better to now put my brain break it down. I'm pretending that I am Michael Phelps, and I'm about to do the butterfly. I'm literally thinking, do I owe my wind to the country? Or am I performing for myself? How does about I am Michael. No, I mean, I don't know maybe he's not thinking about that. Maybe he's just thinking about like the McDonald's that he ate earlier. Did you guys know he eats like so much food?
Noah Pinno:Yes, most
Eric Jiang:athletes do. They have like a 5000 calorie diet or some shit. If we have
Noah Pinno:time for a science lesson, I'd love to explain calories to you.
Heather Yuan:Know, no, okay. No, we can't go. Where are you? sidetracking here, but going back into an athlete's mindset. So do you owe your medals to the country versus are you performing for yourself? I think when we're talking about if you're an athlete coming from a country with a state sponsored program, most likely you feel like you are showing your mettle to the country. And when I say this is not taken lightly as this is just a mind game of like, Okay, do I win or This is literally like, in the example of some Chinese athletes, people shame them, citizens shame them as if they were literally doing the sport themselves, shame them for not winning the gold medal. Athletes feel pressured to compete with injuries, simply because they feel like, you know, when I previously garnered the success, I was, you know, paying back almost the funds that the country has fueled into my athletic career, therefore, I have to force myself to perform.
Eric Jiang:Oh, yo, you know, like one really good example for that is actually, if I recall correctly, a bell Russian athletes by the name of and I hope that I don't butcher this name, Christina see my no sky. a sprinter, actually, from a team, Bella rose at this Tokyo 2020 Olympics, just to give you guys a clear summary of what happened before I go into detail. So basically, she was pressured into competing in the 200 meter
Heather Yuan:sprint, she didn't even know she was competing yet her coach Larry just signed her up.
Noah Pinno:Yeah, was not the category she was training for.
Eric Jiang:Yeah, so her coach signed her up to compete in 200 meters without her knowledge, and obviously, without her consent. And so she posted on Instagram, she was very outspoken about it. And that led her to be labeled as a person with mental disorder or psychological problems. And she got sent back to Belarus, or she was she was going to be sent back to Belarus, and arrested interrogated, because Belarus is really strict on descent. So she is eventually sought asylum in Europe. And she was able to be she was granted asylum by
Noah Pinno:Shake Shack in the airport, and luckily was able to get out. I think this is a case of how many things first of all, if the accountability system is corrupt, how complaining against it can be really hard. In this case, it is an act of detriment, because complaining against your employer is equal to complaining against the government in authoritarian regimes. It doesn't just add difficulty, it actually in dangerous you have to pick up complaints. But of course, this was also a case of not being able to freely opt out. Because if you think about it, if you're competing in a category that you're not trained for, at an Olympic level, you are going to give yourself an injury, you're exposing yourself to huge risks, straining muscles that are not normally strained, depleting your stamina. And it's quite risky to compete in those categories if you haven't prepared. So this was also a case of being pressured to push herself to her limit. And in fact, beyond her limits, and where she was not able to meaningfully say no,
Heather Yuan:I think this is a case as well, where if we look at it from a coach's perspective, if you were coaching someone being hired by a country, obviously that pressure on you, as well forces you to then turn this pressure towards your athlete to get more results. Exactly, you want to be more successful, because you feel like the nation's weight is on you can literally get fired and easily replaced. Whereas if you were a private coach in case, you look out for your athletes, you're more likely to I'm not saying like 110% of the time, this is what happens. But if you were private, maybe you're more likely to care about a
Eric Jiang:private reputation that you have to uphold treating your athletes. Well,
Heather Yuan:yeah, because athletes can change, they can choose who they want to coach with who they want to
Noah Pinno:train, and the board can easily change it to but it's not really the same pressure that you may feel from a national level. If you think about it, if you're accountable, vertically all the way to the government, then the pressure from the government also goes down in the same vein in a way that is equally direct, as it was accountably going up, but does not exist in the private system to the same extent. And I honestly think this is what's behind. A lot of the cases that we've seen in Russian athletes being found guilty of doping. There's a lot of doping that occurs with many athletes across one sport and across many sports, as opposed to just one off athletes. And you know, if you are part of a nationally administered team, and you're being pressured to dope to break international rules, probably also national rules. Let's be honest, by the government's technically, you don't have the freedom to opt out and you don't have the freedom to really take care of your own health and well being.
Heather Yuan:It's a chicken and egg situation except it's who breaks the rule
Noah Pinno:first. Exactly. Everybody feels pressure to push it down. The coaches feel pressured to go along with us, even if their judgment says it's unsafe for athletes, the athletes feel pressured because they feel that their national reputation is at stake. And in a lot of ways that pressure moving downwards leads to people being pushed not just to their limit, but ultimately past their limit
Eric Jiang:and I know this for one final case that probably puts the nail in the coffin for everything is that the Olympics used to be amateur only. And that it was changed. Because like a large part because all these Western countries were complaining that the Eastern, that the European countries that the Asian countries had state sponsored training programs that allowed the athletes to significantly outperform their Western counterparts. And so that's why the Olympic changed from not allowing professional athletes to now allowing professional athletes like that was a direct response to having state sponsored athlete training programs because the results spoke for themselves like they out competed with stern athletes, purely based upon their state sponsored training program.
Heather Yuan:Yeah, so that's a great point, Eric. And I think now that we're getting into the area of like finances, compensation and reward, this goes on into our second area of clash, which is athlete finances.
Noah Pinno:Maybe we could just start by saying like, it's, it's really hard to financially subsist as an athlete, even if you're successful, it has a lot of the same issues with being like a lower tier, like lower popularity celebrity, where you have a lot of money potentially in one moment, but it's not really sustainable. It's up to you to manage it appropriately to use your own fame and stretch that as far as you can. So many people don't realize this, but athletes because of the fact that they commit so much to training, often are put in a lot of financial need.
Heather Yuan:On that point, actually, no as you're talking about it, so I have some stats in front of me, especially in regards to China's Olympic Training Program. So we've we've brought this up just in the past few minutes. But China's training program is completely nationalized. So in front of me, over 400,000 athletes, so including 69%, of China's national champions train at designated 3000 plus government run sports schools. And what that process looks like is government officials will go into rural communities to assess students for sports school. So essentially, like are they literally built talent scouting? Yeah, to be a swimmer from as young of an age of five. You know, we've heard that's where children as young as six are trained add five different levels, depending on their abilities. So there's international master sportsmen national sponsor sportsmen, grade one, grade two and grade three. So with students from grade one and higher, making it to elite sport boarding schools for Olympic Training. So what we're talking about to put it into context is five year old kids, for some four are pulled from their families and forced to board in schools with people they don't know, with coaches to know, and essentially subjected to do a lot of bodily, I don't want to call it torture, because it's not it's not that, but
Noah Pinno:okay, it's strenuous, it's pushing, it's pushing the limits of training. Exactly. Although I will say, in fairness in the western system, I think a lot of the time, without national programs, people are still pressured to train from a really young age. And I think that having that once again, in private hands, can lead to issues with oversight. So there may be cases of national programs pushing kids to their limit, but there could just as easily be abuse cases for young children.
Heather Yuan:Sorry, and I had a point with that, too. And the reason why I was hiding it was because a lot of this is tied into compensation. So you know, in the US, a lot of athletes are successful because they have the money. But in China, because of the subsidized or completely free training programs, athletes don't have to pay for this. And this is always seen as a way for you to break out of your rural life and to succeed, because when they do succeed, not only do they Garner international fame, national fame, but also a lot of netizens. So citizens on the internet, especially in China will actively praise you and you know, applaud you like the 14 year old diver Olympic diver that we just witnessed do perfect 10 dives. She was hailed in China, as you know, a hero
Eric Jiang:as a hero peoples tried to support her because of her backstory as well. Her poor upbringing and exactly reason for competing she was
Heather Yuan:given houses she was given money from the government literally her local government shoved her money and also like just random people, and random people literally ransacked her village
Noah Pinno:and I find a big difference compared to having no national direction or limited national director. Is that the costs for competing are put on the athlete, especially at early stages, especially when you're getting the basic skills to even trial. So we don't hear these same kind of stories of like, you know, rags to riches, because there's such a heavy wealth bias when you do not have national programming.
Eric Jiang:But there's also one thing that again, we need to take into account is that in China, or in any actually, in any state sponsored athlete program, the education is almost purely athletic, right. So, back when the Olympics featured only amateurs, the idea was that these people only have like these people have careers as well, so that if they don't win, they would have a separate career like a doctor or as an engineer to fall back on so that they're not financially bound to their success as an athlete. And I think that's also partly what the US or the western systems kind of prioritize to, like athletes have a career post the games or post their athletic careers when they retire,
Noah Pinno:I would say maybe at one time, but I think that's honestly starting to fall behind to make athletes more competitive. I've heard a lot of debates, a lot of discussion in society, criticizing universities that basically put all or nothing on athletics and have athletic scholarships that basically enroll you in the wild, like geography. That's the saying, like rock African Studies, yeah, something that they just decided was like, you know, their space in this program, and then people will not take it seriously, not really put in as much work, of course, not to the not to as a criticism of the athletes because they are literally putting everything to their sports and not to the criticism of the programs either. Because obviously, if you do well, in this program, that you take them seriously, they can be really rewarding and offer you opportunities. But they end up with degrees that are frequently unemployable. And they also end up with the low grades in those programs. Yeah, and forestry up seen gaps in their resume, because they were just doing sports,
Eric Jiang:I was gonna say the opposite of low grades, actually, there's been a couple of pieces or news articles or pieces on how you get a lot of us schools that are very football focused, boosting their GPAs boosting fold, that's just to keep them in the program, because oh, there's like a GPA requirement for keeping the scholarship or something to gain the program.
Noah Pinno:That's true, although at the same time, that just worsens their qualification exam, reputation, they don't get a good enough education. And if you think about it, like if you have everybody goes into programs, just that because it's something that they can do the minimal work in, that obviously causes those programs to be appreciated less and less, which is very unfortunate. We've gone a bit away from our initial initial points. But I think the important thing to realize is, athletes often have a wealth bias in the private system to be able to participate. And wealth bias often manifests in ways like going to elite universities and dedicating everything to sports, and being privately responsible for paying for your own education. And as a result, you basically only have the money from your family that you may have inherited, that you may have been given for a time, that may not be guaranteed, and at the end of your career, you can be left with nothing, versus in national arrangements in nationally managed teams, it's much more likely that you have steady income, even if you don't do excellent. And it's much more likely that you receive money for longer term, and even basically have your programming and training from the get go funded before you've even traveled for the Olympics. And that I think is a third clash that is really important to this debate, which is the social level of access to participating in these programs, not just for athletes, how are they financially affected? How are they able to afford their post career, but also as a society? Do our athletes actually represent the best of the country? Or do they represent the wealthiest? I will say, though, I think this is so far pretty critical to private systems. But I do think that there's an issue with having the same number of spots, but increased access to those spots. And that is that when you have increased access to the same number of spots, it increases the amount of competition significantly, right. So the top 10 in a group of 20 is not going to be as good as the top 10 in a group of 200. And the same principle is true when you have larger and larger programming to trial for the Olympics. So when that competition is harder, it actually goes full circle back to original point, which is you have people pushing themselves to the absolute limits, not giving their body the proper rest, not giving themselves the acceptance or consolation when they don't do as well as they wanted and reintroducing avenues for corruption or other forms of buy. That are not wealth. And that becomes the problem with the Olympics. Unlike in things like universities where we can open up more spots and universities to offset this problem, you can't exactly just like open up a bunch of new spots in the Olympics. So it's really hard to deal with this increased competition as things become more accessible. Does that mean that we should restrict it only to the wealthy? Certainly not, at least not in my opinion. But it is worth noting that this change is not without significant trade offs.
Heather Yuan:And when we talk about this area of clash as well, I think better framed isn't that it's necessarily an area of clash, but an area of interest. I want to say for Gov when it comes to modeling and structuring this motion, like we talked about at the beginning of our episode, when we talked about this being a sliding scale. We're getting into like policymaking, we're getting into what policy under either private or public systems could you enact to ensure that we you're not facing these problems that Noah just brought up? Right? corruption, like limited spots? How do you actually ensure that you're being fair to people based on athletic prowess and not anything else,
Eric Jiang:but at the end of the day, either system benefits and also detracts from the athlete experience pretty equally? I would say, at least in my opinion, and that, financially speaking, it just depends when the athletes will go broke and who gets to go broke or who gets wealthy?
Noah Pinno:Yes, I completely agree. And this is kind of a case of motions or case of debates where almost all of the clash, almost all of the disagreement is going to be about which mechanism or which system leads to the same impacts. So the impacting itself here, you wouldn't want to focus on too much like it'd be really obvious that, you know, everybody wants athletes to have rights, everybody wants athletes to be able to financially subsist. And we understand why those are important without having to say, three reasons why athletes being healthy is good, or why actually shouldn't go broke. But really, what you care about in this motion is which system produces those impacts the most reliably, at least, that's what I would say is the most important for way.
Heather Yuan:And I think that is a great note to end on. So today, the motion in front of us once again, was this House believes that governments should directly manage Olympic athlete training. We first broke down the motion, when we actually talked about, you know, looking at this motion through a To what extent lens shocked about the stakeholders, and specifically what role the government should have in training of Olympic athletes. Then we broke it down by areas of clash that we saw were impactful or meaningful in this debate. Firstly, athlete welfare, secondly, athlete finances and third point on society level access. Thank you everyone for joining us today and we look forward to seeing you in our next episode.