The 2012 London Olympic games open this week. The Olympics is a celebration of international sporting competition featuring over 10,000 athletes from 205 countries competing in 302 events across 26 Olympic sports. These athletes are at the top of their game and in great physical condition. They stand in stark contrast to the average couch potato who will spend several hours each day watching the events. This couch potato culture has led to over one-third of U.S. adults being labeled obese as defined by the U.S. Center of Disease Control.
The problem of adult obesity begins in childhood. Almost one in five children are considered obese in America. This rate represents a three-fold increase since the 1980 boycott of the Moscow Olympics. Even though the number of athletes and countries involved in the Olympics has doubled in the last three decades, the rate of athleticism in the U.S. has significantly declined.
The CDC has identified the low quality of physical education programs in U.S. schools as a significant contributor to this childhood obesity problem. Current physical education standards lack sufficient rigor. They merely set expectations that students lead active lives when they leave school. We need to address the problem of childhood obesity through more rigorous physical education standards. What's needed is an Olympics-for-all movement. While it is not possible for every athlete to compete in the Olympics, it is important for us to create Olympic readiness standards, so that all students leave our education system prepared to lead lives at the highest levels of physical fitness.
In order to manage the Olympic readiness standards at scale, we need to focus on a small set of sports that are predictive of performance in the 26 Olympic sports. The triathlon seems like the most viable option to serve as the core of the Olympic readiness standards. It is actually three sports in one: swimming, cycling, and distance running. It is one of the most grueling competition formats. The pinnacle event is the Ironman competition in which simply finishing the race grants the finisher the title of Ironman. As an elite sport in itself, the triathlon provides a great preparation for the Olympics, yet it is extremely approachable as there are triathlon events in every community.
A major challenge in addressing the Olympic readiness standards is that the triathlete community is fairly homogeneous. Almost 90% of U.S. triathletes are Caucasian and the average annual household income is $126,000. This homogeneity is also present in the individual sports that make up the triathlon. Almost 80% of college distance runners and around 85% of college swimmers are Caucasian. In order to equalize the playing field for everyone, we will need a significant capital investment in our schools to ensure that every school has a regulation swimming pool and high quality road bicycles. Arrangements need to be made with local communities to find safe routes for all students to engage in long distance training. It is also important that we provide incentives for mostly Caucasian, upper class triathletes to move into poor, minority neighborhoods to provide triathlon training, if only for two years.
The list of issues could go on, but let's pause here before your eyes glaze over with $ signs. If you have reached this point in the essay and you are thinking-"Wow, Olympic readiness standards would be a great idea!"- I have failed to adequately portray the ridiculousness of this idea. While many schools in poor neighborhoods are in great need of infrastructure investment, Olympic readiness standards would be a terrible justification. The Olympic readiness standards are, of course, a parody of the standards-based movement.
Just as the triathlon would serve as the core of the Olympic readiness standards for all 26 Olympic sports, the standards-based movement has selected math puzzles and word games as the core of the college readiness standards for the 45 fields of undergraduate study tracked by the U.S. Department of Education's annual digest of education statistics. Although the triathlon is a great indicator of overall athletic ability, it fails as an adequate predictor of specific sports that distantly share the same underlying skills as the triathlon. Likewise, math puzzles and word games are a great indicator of overall academic ability, but they fail as adequate predictors of specific undergraduate fields of study that emphasize different sets of academic abilities.
As you watch the Olympic games over the next few weeks, think about how impoverished our games would become if we focused on a narrow set of skills as prerequisite for entrance to the games. It will serve as a reminder of how impoverished our universities and our society are by focusing on such a narrow set of skills as the gatekeeper to social mobility.
Next, month I will share my experiences of watching the games and reflect on how the Olympics could serve as a model for a new more inclusive set of college readiness standards.
