Team USA had comfortably garnered both titles during the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Games, with 121 total medals, 46 of which were gold. Which is better: most gold medals, or most overall medals? NBC had certainly emphasized the overall angle during the Opening Ceremony broadcast. The People's Republic of China did not enter the Olympic arena until 1952 and Russia has competed under the Russian flag, the Soviet Union, the Unified Team, and the ROC.īut, like most statistics, Olympic medal counts can be viewed from multiple angles. No nation has won more medals at the Summer Olympics than the United States of America.” Given the changing geo-political landscape in the 1900s, that America has more medals than any other nation is not so surprising.
After a lengthy patriotism-building introduction from Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, NBC host Mike Tirico proclaimed definitively as Team USA entered the stadium, “613 athletes strong. them” approach was at the forefront of NBC's coverage during the opening ceremonies of the 2020 Olympic Games. The 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles garnered in excess of a 25 rating despite the absence of the Soviet Union and other Eastern bloc countries ( Kaplan, 1984). Even in the era of tape-delayed broadcasts, Olympic programming garnered impressive audiences. Eastern bloc countries regularly participated in state-sponsored doping as a means to grow medal counts and demonstrate a superior way of life. The rivalry angle worked well during the Cold War period, the 1960s−1980s, when the Olympics provided a literal playing field to argue which ideology was better, communism or capitalism. Seemingly since American broadcast networks began purchasing Olympic media rights, the networks aggressively promoted medal counts for American athletes as a way to stimulate interest in its product, television broadcasts, by creating a rivalry between the United States and the rest of the world. Following the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, which featured a particularly violent water polo match between the Soviet Union and Hungary, Brundage would go so far as to write to IOC members encouraging the elimination of all team sports ( Senn, 1999).Ī prominent and overt manifestation of nationalism in the Olympics is the media-driven medal counts. The parade of athletes is by nation, not by sport. Athletes compete for nations, not against one another. Yet the structure and organization of the Olympic Games always competed with that spirit. The growing ideological polarization and increased nationalism which greeted Brundage in 1952 contradicted the spirit of Olympism. Its ideal was to transcend individual and national pride in competition.” In their edited book on Olympism, ( Seagrave and Chu, 1981) believed the concept “Aims at the harmonious development of the intellectual, moral and physical aspects of a human being through athletic competition.” Similarly, ( Smirnov, 2000) concluded “Olympism had the idea to educate through the provision and encouragement of sport as one of the humanities. Scholars regularly analyze and attempt to interpret what Olympism truly means. That vision centered on Coubertin's linguistic addition, “Olympism.”
The creation of new nation-states following World War II, many of them aligned with either capitalist or communist ideologies, presented a myriad of problems for Brundage as he sought to uphold the vision Pierre de Coubertin had for the Games.
When Avery Brundage became president of the International Olympic Committee, he inherited an increasingly nationalistic Olympic movement. “Nationalism has been heralded as the nemesis that has plagued the modern Olympic Games since their inception in 1896,” ( Toohey and Warning, 1981, p.
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