London’s Lesson for Romney and Ryan: Government Works

Finally, it’s all over, and Team U.S.A. came out on top, with a hundred and four medals, forty-six of them gold. China came in second, with thirty-eight golds and eighty-eight in total. Rah! Rah! Rah! “The USA Crushed Every Other Country in the Medal Count. Why Is America So Awesome at the Olympics?” a headline at Slate asked.

The main reason is that the United States is a very big, very rich country, and it should come out on top. On a per-capita basis, other rich nations did equally well, perhaps better. If you combine the five biggest European countries (France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, and Spain) they have practically the same number of inhabitants as the U.S: about three hundred and fifteen million people. Taken together, the European countries won a hundred and eighty-eight medals—almost twice the U.S. total—and sixty-two golds.

So, no, the real lesson of London 2012 isn’t that the U.S. is the most fantabulous country on the planet and that everywhere else stinks, although in Michael Phelps, Allyson Felix, LeBron James, and others we certainly have some incredible athletes. The real takeaway from the Games is one that might surprise Mitt Romney and his new running mate, Paul Ryan: government initiatives can work, and very effectively at that.

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You may recall—who can forget?—that a day or two before the Games started, Romney questioned London’s preparedness to host the 2012 Olympics, saying there were “a few things that were disconcerting.” To be fair to the foot-in-mouth gold medalist, he wasn’t the only one raising doubts about transportation arrangements, security, and other issues. The Brits were busy doing it themselves. Romney’s crime was to join in a family row, which instantly united the protagonists against him.

In the end, the British government made sure the Games went off without a hitch. The Home Office settled a dispute with customs and immigration workers, which averted a threatened strike at ports and airports. When a private firm failed to provide enough security guards to secure the various sites of the Games, British soldiers stepped in and did what by all accounts was a bang-up job. Answering Romney’s question about whether the host nation would “come together and celebrate the Olympic moment,” the British public packed the sporting venues and turned the two-week Games into a national celebration. Even the Queen played a role, joining Daniel Craig for a James Bond spoof in the opening ceremony, which got things off to a splendid start.

As Romney discovered in Salt Lake City, putting on such a show costs a lot of money, and inevitably much of those costs falls upon the public sector. British taxpayers put up £9.3 billion (about fifteen billion dollars) to finance the Games. (The London Organizing Committee raised another seven hundred million pounds from big corporations, such as Adidas and BMW, and the International Olympic Committee, which gets most of its money from television networks like NBC, kicked in about the same amount.) There is always a lot of debate about whether public investments in one-off events like the Olympics are worthwhile. In some cases, they certainly aren’t. But these Games could well turn out to be an exception. In staging them in Stratford, a run-down neighborhood, and investing heavily in transportation links, the organizers gave a boost to the rejuvenation of London’s eastern section, which was already happening anyway.

Finally, but by no means least, there is the outstanding performance of Team G.B., which came in third in the gold-medal count (it won twenty-nine) and fourth in the over-all medals table. Obviously, home-field advantage played a role, but that is only a small part of the story, which goes back to the Barcelona Games, in 1992, when Great Britain won just five gold medals, and Atlanta, in 1996, when it won only one gold.

In a country that is just as sports-mad as this one, the British showings in Barcelona and, especially, in Atlanta, were viewed as a humiliation that demanded remedial action. The solution came in the form of the National Lottery, which John Major, the Conservative Prime Minister, launched in 1994, promising to pledge most of the proceeds to “good causes,” which were defined as cultural activities, preserving historic sites, and funding the development of sports teams. Until then, Britain had nothing to match the excellent sports programs at American universities, or the big government-funded programs in countries like Russia and China.

In the past fifteen years, government spending on sports facilities and sports-training programs has steadily increased to a point where the British Olympic team now receives about a hundred and twenty-five million pounds (about two hundred million dollars) in annual funding. And guess what? The team’s performances have improved greatly. Four years ago in Beijing, the British team won nineteen golds and forty-seven medals over-all, putting them in fourth place behind China, the United States, and Russia. This year, Team G.B. leapfrogged Russia in golds.

“You do not get excellence on the cheap nor do you get all the virtuous outcomes that come from that without long term and predictable levels of funding,” Lord Coe, the great middle-distance runner who headed up the London Organizing Committee, said over the weekend. “That’s what we witnessed in Beijing, that’s what we witnessed here and if we want to maintain our position in Olympic sport then that’s what you will need to do.” Many of the British heroes from this year’s Games echoed Coe’s sentiments. “I was at Atlanta in 1996 when G.B. finished thirty-sixth in medal table,” said Ben Ainslie, a sailor who just won his fourth gold medal. “So to see where we are now in third place at London 2012 demonstrates just how successful this strategic investment has been.”

I haven’t seen Romney or Ryan asked about the financing of the Olympics. Their response would probably be that Team U.S.A. did splendidly without much government backing, and that’s true. The United States Olympic Committee, unlike its British counterpart, relies on individual donations and corporate sponsorship for funding. Such a system can produce great athletes, especially when it is combined with supportive parents and outstanding college programs. But government-financed initiatives can work, too: the British showed that.

In fact, the entire London Games was a testament to the productive role that governments can play. Yes, governments sometimes screw things up. But often—far more often than Romney and Ryan would like to admit—they make things happen that the private sector can’t manage by itself.

See our full coverage of the Games at The Olympic Scene.

Photograph by Jocelyn Bain Hogg.