The Privatisation of Talent

Jackson Firmstone

A quadruple axel is the premier skill in figure skating, long seen as the El Dorado of the sport, and has only recently been within reach of humanity. The American figure skater Ilia Malinin (known as The Quad God) is the first person in history to complete all 4.5 rotations in an international competition. His recent stumble at the Olympic Games in Milan was a shock not only for himself but for the entire figure skating community, as he was considered the favorite for gold. Ilia’s stumble, although tragic, is representative of a larger trend within American Olympic performance. Why are American athletes falling behind and what does it reflect about society? 

The Olympic Games are a crucial tradition in the international community, as they represent the global co-operation and competition that has been central in the 21st century. They have been forwarding diplomacy since ancient Athens and continue to adapt to modern requirements as a major platform for cultural exchange.

The Olympics have always functioned as more than sport. They are a recurring display of how societies organise bodies, discipline, and the opportunity within them. Since the modern Games began in 1896, nations have used the competition not only to win prestige but to demonstrate the success of their social systems. As Mahdi Feizabadi and his co-authors note in their article in the Journal of Sports Science, “sport symbolizes the international environment while also being a pragmatic tool of that environment.”

The 1936 Berlin Olympics served as a performance of ideological legitimacy for the Nazi regime. During the Cold War, medal tables became proxies for competing political orders. Even in the contemporary era participation itself can carry symbolic weight, as delegations signal inclusion in global society regardless of political tension.

A more modern example of the cultural importance of the Olympics came in 2012 when the Iranian government sent their athletes to compete. At the time, the Iranian government was under severe sanctions from the international community for their continued pursuit of weapons grade uranium. The response was clear and punitive, as economic pressure spearheaded by the United States was applied in an attempt to incentivise reversing their nuclear program. In this tense geopolitical arena, the Iranian delegation played important roles, both in unifying a nation despite severe economic pressures and in acting as a cultural bridge to Western powers. 

The Games, in other words, do not merely measure athletic ability—they measure how nations cultivate athletes in the first place.

For much of the twentieth century, the United States produced athletes through breadth rather than specialization. Public schools, municipal leagues, and accessible facilities created a wide athletic base. Elite competitors emerged from participation rather than selection. The system relied less on early identification and more on mass involvement.

In recent decades, that pipeline has changed.

The pipeline to elite sport begins in childhood and depends on repeated exposure. Increasingly in the United States, that exposure is purchased rather than encountered. Youth sport is no longer primarily a recreational activity that occasionally produces elite competitors, but a structured developmental ladder requiring coaching, travel, and early specialization.

The collegiate sports economy and rising tuition costs have intensified this process. Private youth sports organizations maintain profit margins through preying on parents' via their children’s dreams and by limiting opportunities outside private clubs.

Exacerbating this is how athletic scholarships function as the singular pathway to economic mobility for many, encouraging families to invest heavily in training from a young age. In the US, spending in youth sports now exceeds $40 billion annually and has attracted private equity investment. The purchase of IMG Academy by BPEA EQT and Nord Anglia Education exemplifies this shift—a 600-acre training complex is now operating less as a community facility and more as a long-term performance investment environment.

These systems produce a small group of extremely refined athletes, but they narrow the population able to enter them. This narrowing becomes clearest in sports that require expensive environments before talent can even be discovered.

Snow sports provide the most visible case. The duopoly of Vail Resorts and Alterra Mountain Company has dramatically increased the cost of slope access, where young skiers first develop familiarity. A single-day pass at major American resorts can cost hundreds of dollars, representing a multi-thousand percent increase since the 1970s. For many families the cost is prohibitive at the introductory stage. In European alpine regions, where infrastructure is denser and access remains broader, the entry point is less restrictive.

Winter sports therefore reveal structural change earlier than other disciplines: participation determines the future talent pool. This is why the first indicators of this structural narrowing are seen at the Winter Olympics. 

Only after this narrowing appears in development does it show up in results.

While the United States has historically dominated Olympic competition, recent Winter Games show declining representation in specific disciplines. The American alpine team dropped from multiple podium finishes in Vancouver (2010) to only a single silver in Beijing (2022). In speed skating—historically a Dutch-American rivalry—the United States has fallen to sixth in the world, while the Netherlands have won dozens more medals since 2010. Individual successes, such as American speed skater Jordan Stolz both winning gold and setting a record at this year’s Olympics, still occur but they emerge as outliers in a declining average.

Similar patterns appear outside winter sports. The 2024 US Open women’s semifinals featured American tennis players Jessica Pegula and Emma Navarro, both supported by immense family wealth. Their achievements remain legitimate athletic accomplishments, but they illustrate a demographic shift: development increasingly depends on sustained private funding rather than institutional access.

Across sports, the United States continues to produce excellence, yet from a narrower segment of society.

The Olympic medal table therefore reflects not only national strength but national accessibility. A country can remain wealthy and still produce fewer broadly distributed athletes if participation becomes conditional.

Rather than a simple athletic decline, recent results suggest a reorganization from population-based to investment-based development. The Games measure not only who trains hardest, but how widely a nation allows its citizens to begin.

At a distance, these trends can be read as uniquely American—a by-product of scale and commercial sport. But the question posed by the Olympics is portable: what conditions allow a country to discover athletes before it decides to invest in them? 

In New Zealand the pathway remains visibly different. Many elite athletes still emerge from school competitions, regional clubs, and multi-sport childhoods rather than single-sport specialization. Facilities are uneven and funding limited, yet the entry point is often informal: a public field, a volunteer coach, a seasonal league. The system produces fewer athletes overall, but the barrier to beginning remains comparatively low.

This low bar to entry is extremely important to maintain, not only for New Zealand sport but for New Zealand in general. The limited opportunity for mobility in United States athletics is representative of the rampant growth of economic inequality. Seen this way, the Olympic Games compare not only nations, but pathways: some systems search widely and refine later, others refine early and search narrowly.