Why do some sports go from hot to not?
Throughout the month of February, we have seen articles commemorating the 10th anniversary of the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics and finding meaning in comparisons between 2002 and today.
One of the more interesting comparisons was the column by Cam Cole that appeared in the The Gazette Feb. 16 (“Figure skating slides into fringes”) that noted a decline in the popularity of figure skating since the Salt Lake City games.
The major story of those games was the controversy concerning the judging in the pairs event of the skating competition. A French judge admitted she had been pressured to vote for the Russian pair, and so they won the gold medal over Canada’s Jamie Salé and David Pelletier. Later on, Salé and Pelletier were awarded a second pair of gold medals and changes were made to the scoring system.
It’s interesting to look at the decline in popularity of figure skating since 2002 and speculate on the effect that changes to the scoring system had. Cole thinks that subjective judging actually added to the drama and popularity of the sport. That may well be.
However, it has been my experience that the deterioration of a sport’s popularity is rarely attributable to one factor.
At any rate, very few sports have been able to maintain such a consistently high popularity with fans as tennis and soccer have done.
In my view (as past coach of numerous former Canadian Olympic wrestling teams), factors that can lead to the downturn in a sport’s popularity include rule changes, countries losing their ability or willingness to continue to develop top performers, economic conditions and over-exposure, to name but few.
While Asian nations (China, Japan and Korea) are increasingly gaining international prominence in figure skating, other nations, like Austria and Britain, are experiencing difficulties maintaining or reclaiming their past glories.
Political changes have also seen former skating powers like East Germany disappear from the medal podium. And the disintegration of the Soviet Union provoked a coaching migration to the West that has had a negative impact on subsequent Russian performances.
For Canada, though, there has been one great change since 2002.
Canadians shouldn’t forget that the Salt Lake City games saw the introduction of a number of new sports that changed the balance of power in medals won by participant nations.
Canada placed fourth overall in Salt Lake City, with 17 medals compared with 13 for Russia. in 2010,canada placed third overall, with 26 medals – and with the most gold medals (14) of any country. It isn’t just the popularity of sports that can go up and down; the performance of countries can, too, and we can see this clearly with the hindsight of 10 years on Salt Lake City.