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No, the Obama economy doesn't have anything to do with it. We have sports deeply embedded in our school system. This gives the U.S. a leg up in many youth sports because most of the world thinks their schools are for teaching and learning, not playing games. Elite athletes in all of the big sports can count on scholarship support and, if they go the major college route, excellent coaching through graduation. Then, just as they're approaching their peak performance years, the school based support system stops. For most of them, things get harum scarum pretty fast.

Nowhere is it written in the book of life that elite athletes are owed public subsidies for playing games. But if we expect U.S. athletes to be competitive in international competitions, we should at least be aware of what other countries are doing. This problem has been masked for a long time because the U.S. since WWII has been, by far, the biggest of the rich countries and the richest of the big countries. We are the third most populous country in the world. India and China have more people but have been very poor, and competitive athletics are very much a luxury good. Of the top ten countries in the world by population, the U.S. is the only wealthy one; in addition to India and China, Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Russia and Mexico aren't in the same league. Russia has always punched above its weight athletically because of massive state support, initiated back in the Cold War era for propaganda purposes. But most of the big countries are poor. Of our peer group countries, we have two and a half times the people of Japan and four times the population of the larger European counties. That's a formula for winning a lot of medals.

I dwell on this because Americans have gotten used to athletic excellence with a slapdash, jerry-rigged post-college financing system. Post college, we have the big professional sports that are incredibly wealthy due to tv dollars, while everyone else starves. A few champions here and there are visible enough to get substantial sponsorships and ad deals (especially if they're physically attractive and good tv talkers). But athletic excellence can't be sustained on the basis of a random scattering of Wheaties box champs. We need a full pipeline with rigorous competition at every level and a development system that gives adequate support past age 21. As the rest of the world continues to advance economically, the U.S. edge will steadily erode. We can either rethink our support system for elite athletes in non-revenue sports, or we can reduce our expectations for international competitions.