world sports
 

how much would we effect the Olympics if we banned competitors from training in the USA/attending USA colleges seems like a lot of competitors use our resources. Kinda like the Chinese do in keeping their training in house only. Olympics don't mean much here and I know this will never happen, but just think of it as hypothetical if we went after it hard.

Include our pro leagues as this. Foreign competitors would be banned from them.

The NHL would go to shit if we kept out the Europeans and Canadians.

First of all, the NHL isn't YOUR league and many countries have their own leagues at stuff. Maybe not the same quality but neither would yours be if you didn't "allow" international flavour in there.

It's a business. They're paying for it. Lots of athletes train in Canada regardless of what country they're competing in. They're paying for that privelege.

Even though it's headquarters are in New York and there is more American teams, the NHL wouldn't be part of this hypothetical. It started off as a Canadian league, so we wouldn't include this league in the hypothetical.

Wow, epic fail. It's a fucking hypothetical and I already said it was never going to happen.

Obviously we would lose a lot of athletes, but overall the in nation quality would rise to fill the void left and the international world wouldn't have access to our high dollar training facilities. Team sports make up very little of the medals, where it would really change some things is the individual sports. Tons of athletes train in our college system. If we focused on medals much more so than we do now, we could rise to meet the chinese.

I didn't say the NHL was "ours" although it's headquarters is in NYC. My point was that if the US NHL teams didn't allow foreign players the entire NHL would go to shit so I really agree with you on that part. It would water down the league too much.

The other pro sports it doesn't matter because we don't have a huge influx of foreign born athletes in those sports, although it seems the NBA has been getting a lot of European players lately.

Fair enough. I kind of went off on a tangent there.

Okay well hypothetically, I think it wouldn't make a lick of difference to the US athletes (unless they were only allowed to train in house), and although there might be *some* effect on other nations....I think it'd be very minimal. Coaches would travel to train. :idk:

The Big Four sports in America (Football, Baseball, Basketball, and Hockey; I don't really count hockey as a big sport cause it's only you northern fools who like that shit, kinda like NASCAR for the south) only make up 2-3 medals depending on if baseball/basketball is in the olympics. They don't have an impact anyway.

If the US changed focus from team sports (impossible) and built a fence around their training programs like China, I think you would see a huge difference. The USA right now doesn't really give a damn about the olympics 90% of the time, if there was a drive countrywide to compete like the Chinese, I bet we would see a difference.

Basically, I think Chinese will own both olympics before long. They are doing what Russians did when they were communist.

No shit. You have 10X the amount of people we do, and we make up over 50% of it! (was over 70% in the '70s though, were slipping)

I see your point. I'm not in the US though so I wasn't aware that team sports aren't a big deal.

You do alright in individual medals though no?

Take it a step further. What if athletes could only play for their closest local team?

Tell that to Gary "I will never let another Candian team in the league, and will do my best to move the existing Canadian teams to the United States" Bettman.

Then kiss parity goodbye.

Think of it though? And this is not a dig on their athletes. But to be conservative, ill say they have 5x the talent pool we do. We each have 8 Gold (and were quite likely to get 2 in curling today), they have 12 silver and twelve bronze. We have 6 silver and three bronze and a shitload of 4ths and 5ths that coulda gone either way. Both countries lost medals that were almost expected, and both countries support athletes in college that compete for their country in the olympics.

In fact, most of the womens hockey team from the USA, come up here play all winter in the Canadian womens pro league.

The only country that has beaten us for total medals won in any olympics from 2000 on has been Germany. They did it in the 02 and 06 winter olympics. It doesn't look like that is going to happen this year though. China won more gold medals than the US did in Beijing, but the US won more medals overall. That was also with the advantage of China hosting. I don't expect that to continue in 2012.

To the original question, I think most foreign competitors are training at America's colleges while students there. The colleges are paying for the facilities. They also decide who attends their school. They appear to believe they ultimately benefit from bringing these foreign athletes over. I'm not sure how it would function either outside of a total ban on foreign athletes at American colleges. My other issue is I really don't care. Its just the olympics. Outside of generating a bit of nationalism and xenophobia it isn't like they really matter. The whole idea seems impractical to implement and of limited value.

He destroyed the NBA, so they gave him a job in the NHL.

I honestly cant believe he hasnt been asked for his resignation yet.

Again, it has no basis on reality and is a hypothetical. Basically would the US medal count go up or down? No bearing in xenophobia or the practical implementation of it.

It takes a very non human rights oriented country with very little freedom to do such a thing.

You and me both. He sickens me.

OK, from that standpoint I think our medals would go up, possibly by a pretty significant amount, in the summer games. For the winter games, if we assume that other countries would follow suit, I think our medal count would remain the same or possibly decrease.

You'd be banned from world cup and have no way to guage your skills against others, bringing down your medal count drasticly.

As I read Trip's post he wasn't talking about banning international competition, just international training and competing in other county's leagues. If you mean World Cup soccer, not being able to have our players play in Europe would definitely hurt our national team, but we could still field a team. Our men's team hasn't won shit in over 100 years and our women's team only accounts for one medal per olympics anyway.

Our downhill skiers would still be able to compete in world cup skiing. There is a World Cup for rugby but I doubt we will be in medal contention when rugby sevens comes to the 2016 games. Beyond that I don't know of any other world cups.

Our players would be allowed out. We would just drastically restrict training at our facilities. Pretty much like a ussr approach.

UMMMM...

World cup of hockey, world cup of skiing, world cup of speed skating, and pretty much every other sport in the world dude. . Almost every sport has a world cup, and if you close off your boarders to other athletes training in your country, you exclude yourself from the world cup.

I knew about skiing but didn't know about eligibility requirements. Hockey I didn't know about, but considering it has only happened twice in the last 16 years I suspect there are a lot of people who don't know about it and I doubt missing out would cause a tremendous drop in skill. Skating and the rest I don't know about and if we would be excluded I would imagine that would hurt.

Ya, the world cup has a lot of rules on what your country must do to be elligible.

The reason we notice it more here, is because really, who wants to go train in Korea and all these other holes? Nice places to visit, not somewhere you'd wanna go to school.

Oh, and most world cups arent on a 4 year schedule like soccer and rugby.