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The sequins and the sludge: What the Olympic Games don't want you to see
James Simms
Jul 15, 2026 4:45:01 PM
Tonight, England face Argentina in the World Cup semi-final at 8pm - and right now, across the country, teachers, students and fans are doing exactly what the FIFA machine wants them to do: watching, feeling, believing. The spectacle is extraordinary. The emotion is real. And the broadcast rights for this tournament cost more than most of us can meaningfully comprehend.
I've been thinking about that a lot this week. Not because I don't want England to win - I desperately do - but because one major sporting event has a way of illuminating another. And as I watched the quarter-final on Saturday night, after watching England knock Mexico out of their own tournament at the Azteca the previous weekend, I found myself thinking not about football, but about the Olympics.
Because the questions I want to ask about the Olympic Games - who really benefits, who carries the cost, and why we find it so hard to say so out loud - are the same questions I could ask about tonight's match. The sequins are unmissable. The sludge is buried.
This post isn't about the World Cup. But it starts there, because I think that's where your mind is today. And I think the discomfort I'm about to ask you to sit with will land differently if we begin somewhere familiar.
Please look at the title of this post for a moment. The sequins and the sludge. It's a provocative image, and I want to be upfront: It's deliberate. Because I am about to say some things about the Olympic and Paralympic Games that will make some of you uncomfortable, perhaps even angry, and I think you deserve to know that from the outset.
I am not here to tell you that the Olympics are bad. I am not here to denigrate athletes, mock the movement, or position myself as the contrarian who sneers at the thing everyone else loves. Quite the opposite. What I am going to argue is this: The greatest threat to the long-term sustainability and integrity of the Olympic Games is not cynicism, but rather the taboo around criticism. It is the unspoken rule (enforced by sentiment, nostalgia, the sheer emotional power of the thing,...) that says you cannot question the Olympics, because it's the Olympics.
That taboo, colleagues, is doing real damage. And I think it's time we talked about it honestly.
But here's the thing I didn't expect to find when I started looking carefully: The problems aren't modern corruptions of a pure original ideal. They are the ideal. They were there at the beginning. And understanding that changes everything.
The confession
I grew up addicted to sport. As a child and teenager, I would set my alarm for ungodly hours to watch Trans World Sport, that wonderful early-morning window into a world of athletic endeavour that most people in Britain had never seen. I followed every athlete. I watched every minute of every major competition (World Cups, World Championships, Olympic Games) and I screamed at the television every time a British athlete competed.I was, in the truest sense, a believer. I held the Olympic Games in a sanctified state. When I watched the opening ceremony, I felt something close to religious awe. I saw worldliness, fair play and integrity. I saw the best of humanity gathered in one place, competing not for money or power but for the purest of reasons: to find out who was fastest, strongest, highest.
I swallowed exactly what I was told the Olympics were. And I swallowed it joyfully, completely, without question.
It took years, and a growing understanding of sport as a commercial and political system, to make me look more carefully at what I had accepted so uncritically. When I did, I found something that troubled me deeply. Not because the Games are worthless. They are not. But because the story I had been told (the story most of us are told) is radically, structurally incomplete.
And when I traced that incomplete story back to its roots, I found something I hadn't expected. The injustice wasn't an accident. It was the point.
The roots: "Amateur" was never what you think it was
Those of us who teach A-level PE will recognise the term immediately: the gentleman amateur. It appears in the specification. We teach it as a social history concept (the idea that, in Victorian Britain, sport was conceived as a leisure pursuit for educated, middle-class men of independent means, rather than a livelihood for working people).But I want to suggest that most of us (myself included, for many years) have taught this concept without fully reckoning with its implications for the Olympics we still celebrate today.
When Pierre de Coubertin revived the Olympic Games in 1896, the foundational rule was amateurism. Athletes had to be amateurs to compete. We tend to hear that word in its modern sense (unpaid, non-professional, competing for love rather than money) and it sounds almost romantic. Pure, even.
It was not pure. It was a euphemism.
In late 19th-century sporting culture, "amateur" was a class designation. The 1878 Henley Regatta rulebook (a document that shaped the sporting culture de Coubertin drew from) stated explicitly that no person could be considered an amateur who was, or had been, "by trade or employment for wages, a mechanic, artisan, or labourer." Not paid for rowing. A mechanic. An artisan. A labourer. The rule was not about money changing hands in sport. It was about what you did for a living outside of it.
The most striking illustration of this is Jack Kelly Sr., an American rower who won Olympic gold in 1920, and who was the father of Grace Kelly. Before his Olympic triumph, Kelly had been barred from competing at Henley because he had worked as a bricklayer. He was, by any measure, one of the finest oarsmen in the world. He was excluded not because he had been paid to row, but because he had worked with his hands.
That is what "amateur" meant. It meant: this is not for people like you.
Sport historian Allen Guttmann has argued that the Victorian middle and upper classes invented the rules of amateurism explicitly to exclude the lower orders from the play of the leisure class. De Coubertin's Olympic movement did not challenge this ideology. It enshrined it.
Here, then, is the thing that reframes everything else in this post: the idea that the Olympic Games were ever a level playing field, ever a space in which participation was based purely on ability, regardless of background or means, is a founding myth. From day one, the Games were structured to favour those who could afford to train without being paid. From day one, they were a middle-class institution dressed in the language of universal human aspiration.
The poverty of today's athletes is not a modern betrayal of that original ideal.
It is the original ideal, still running.
The core argument
Let me be clear about what I am and am not arguing.I am not arguing that the Olympics produce no good. They produce enormous good. I am not arguing that the IOC is staffed by villains. It is not. I am not arguing that the athletes who compete are anything other than extraordinary human beings doing extraordinary things.
What I am arguing is this: There is a profound and largely unexamined mismatch between who provides the value of the Olympic Games and who receives the reward. And that mismatch has a history that stretches back to 1896, and before.
The athletes provide almost everything. They are the product. Without them (their years of sacrifice, their physical suffering, their financial hardship, their willingness to subordinate entire decades of their lives to the pursuit of excellence), there is no Olympic Games, no broadcast deal, no sponsorship, no opening ceremony,... There is nothing.
And yet.
The IOC generated over $7.7 billion in revenue in the 2021–2024 cycle alone. The vast majority came from broadcast rights and commercial sponsorship. NBC paid $7.75 billion for US broadcast rights covering the Games through to 2032, and has since signed a further $3 billion extension through to 2036. The IOC itself ended 2024 with reserves of nearly $5 billion and recorded a surplus of over $1 billion in that year alone.
Meanwhile, a US Congressional commission found that American elite athletes were, on average, financially worse off for having competed, spending around $12,000 per year more than they earned from their sport. In Australia, a 2023 report found that 46% of elite athletes over 18 earned less than $23,000 per year, which is below the poverty line. The IOC does not pay athletes to compete, to win or to produce the spectacle that generates billions.
The sequins (Phelps, Daley, Farah, Biles) are real. Their wealth, their fame, their endorsement deals: all real. But they are the exception. They are the glittering surface of a system in which the overwhelming majority of participants are not enriched but quietly, incrementally, financially ground down.
They are the sequins. What lies beneath is sludge.
And here is the uncomfortable truth: The men who designed the system in 1896 would not have been surprised by any of this. They would have considered it entirely appropriate.
Ten things I believe about the Olympic Games
1. The athletes are extraordinary. The system that exploits them is not.Let's start here, because everything else depends on it. The men and women who compete at Olympic level are among the most dedicated, disciplined and remarkable human beings on the planet. Their commitment is total. Their sacrifice is real. Their achievements are genuinely awe-inspiring.
None of what follows is a criticism of them. It is a criticism of the structure that extracts value from their bodies and their sacrifices and distributes that value upward, to broadcast corporations, commercial partners, governing bodies and administrators, while leaving the athletes themselves to wonder how they will pay next month's training bill.
2. "Amateur" was always a euphemism. We need to stop pretending otherwise.
In A-level PE, we teach the gentleman amateur as a historical concept: a curious relic of Victorian Britain that sport has long since moved beyond. But has it?
The original Olympic requirement for amateurism was not fundamentally about the purity of competition, but about social exclusion. You could not compete if you were a mechanic, an artisan, a labourer, not because you had been paid to run or jump or row, but because you worked with your hands for a living. The amateur rule ensured that Olympic sport remained a leisure activity for those who had the financial means to pursue it without payment.
That ideology did not die with de Coubertin. It mutated. Today, you can compete in the Olympic Games whether you are a bricklayer or a banker. But can you actually reach Olympic level if you cannot afford to train, travel and compete for a decade without a sustainable income? For the vast majority of the world's athletes, the answer is no. The barrier is no longer written into the rulebook. But it is still there.
3. The IOC's claim to be a non-profit organisation requires serious scrutiny.
The IOC describes itself as a non-profit organisation that redistributes 90% of its revenues to the Olympic Movement. That sounds generous. But look more carefully. In 2024, the IOC generated over $4.6 billion in revenue and recorded a surplus of over $1 billion, added directly to its own reserves. Those reserves now stand at nearly $5 billion. The $7.7 billion generated in the 2021–2024 cycle was distributed across organising committees, national Olympic committees and international federations. Almost none of it reached individual athletes directly. Non-profit is a legal classification. It is not a moral one.
4. The doping crisis is not a corruption of the Olympic ideal. It is a product of it.
The 1988 Seoul Olympics gave us Ben Johnson, the fastest man alive, stripped of his gold medal in the most dramatic drug scandal the Games had seen. We framed it as an aberration, an individual failing, a bad apple.
But the doping crisis has never gone away. Russia's state-sponsored programme, exposed comprehensively after Sochi 2014, was not the work of rogue individuals. It was systematic, government-directed, and designed to maximise medal counts because medals at the Olympic Games translate directly into national prestige and political capital.
Here's the thing: When you create a system in which reaching the Olympic podium means the difference between obscurity and fame, between financial precarity and endorsement deals, between poverty and the sequins, you create conditions in which doping becomes rational. Athletes dope not because they are morally deficient but because the system has made the rewards so enormous and the path so brutal that some will do whatever it takes.
The doping crisis is the system's conscience. And it was, in a sense, predicted by the original design: a system built to reward those who can sustain performance without remuneration will always intensify the pressure on those who cannot.
5. Politicians use the Olympics as a free publicity machine. And we let them.
Boris Johnson waving a Union Jack at the 2012 London Olympics; Vladimir Putin, presiding over Sochi 2014, a Games we now know was chemically assisted, using that success as a pillar of the nationalist narrative that preceded military aggression in Ukraine; Donald Trump positioning himself beside the FIFA World Cup and the forthcoming Los Angeles Olympics, absorbing reflected glory from events he had no role in creating. Politicians do not fund the training. They do not share the financial hardship, travel to qualifiers at their own expense, work part-time jobs to cover training costs, or retire at thirty-two with a body held together with surgical tape and no pension. They show up for the photographs. They bask in the reflected gold. And we largely allow it, because the emotional power of the Olympics makes us lower our critical guard.
6. The Olympic Games do genuinely bring people together. That's what makes the exploitation so offensive.
I want to be honest about this, because intellectual honesty requires it. The Olympics do bring people together. I have felt this personally. There is something genuinely powerful about nations setting aside their conflicts (however temporarily, however imperfectly) to compete by agreed rules in pursuit of shared excellence.
Competing for one's nation produces a form of nationalism that feels generous rather than aggressive. Inclusive rather than exclusionary. I love this. I have always loved this.
But this is precisely what makes the economic exploitation so offensive. The genuine good (the community, the inspiration, the shared humanity) is real. And it is being used as a cover. The emotional power of the Olympic ideal functions as a shield, deflecting scrutiny from a model that extracts enormous financial and political value from athletes who see almost none of it. De Coubertin understood this dynamic instinctively. The language of universal human aspiration was, from the beginning, wrapped around a structure that served particular interests.
7. The taboo around criticism is the most dangerous thing about the Olympics.
In no other context do we accept the argument that something cannot be criticised because it is too important or too beloved. We scrutinise the NHS because we love it and want it to survive. We scrutinise our schools because we care about children's futures.
The Olympics matter. So why do we treat it as beyond examination?
When someone raises concerns about the IOC's financial model, the treatment of host city communities, or the political capture of the Games by authoritarian governments, the response is too often disbelief. How can you criticise the Olympics? Look at the athletes.
Yes. Look at them. And then ask why so many of them are below the poverty line.
8. The UK's World Class Programme is admirable, but it is the exception, not the rule.
In the United Kingdom, we developed a salary-based funding structure through the World Class Programme, supported by National Lottery money and administered through UK Sport. It is genuinely good. It has transformed British Olympic performance and provided real financial support to athletes who would otherwise have had none.
But it is time-limited, performance-contingent and available in only a handful of nations. The vast majority of the world's Olympic athletes receive nothing systematic from the movement that profits from their performance. They reach the highest level of global sporting achievement through personal financial sacrifice and family support. They compete, the cameras roll, the broadcast deals are signed, the sponsors activate, and then they go home, frequently poorer than when they started.
Jack Kelly Sr. could not row at Henley because he was a bricklayer. His sporting descendants cannot sustain Olympic careers because they don't have the financial means to do so.
9. The stories of the famous few are there to distract us, not by conspiracy, but by design.
The way the Olympic narrative is constructed (foregrounding the exceptional, the decorated, the commercially successful) functions ideologically. It tells a story about what Olympic sport produces: fame, wealth and legacy; and that story is true for a tiny minority.
A US federal report found that 26.5% of current American elite athletes earn less than $15,000 a year, while 59.1% of USOPC executives and board members earn more than $150,000. One US speedskater trained six days a week before the Sochi Olympics while relying on food stamps. Some of the most talented competitors in the world have slept in their cars.
These are not edge cases. They are the norm. The Phelps story is the sequin. The speedskater on food stamps is the sludge. And we are shown the sequin, again and again, until we forget to look underneath.
10. Katya Alexandrovskaya deserved better from the system she gave everything to.
In 2017, Ekaterina Alexandrovskaya (Katya) and her partner, Harley Windsor, became Australia's first figure skating world junior champions. In 2018, they competed at the PyeongChang Winter Olympics. They were an Indigenous Australian boy from western Sydney and a Russian girl who switched allegiances for her adopted country, and their story was exactly the kind of story the Olympic movement loves to tell.
In July 2020, Katya died by suicide in Moscow. She was 20 years old.
I am not suggesting that the Olympic system caused her death. Her story was complex, and her struggles were deeply personal. I am suggesting, however, that a movement generating billions in revenue, a movement whose stated reason for existence is the welfare and development of athletes, must be asked searching questions about what it does for the Katyas. The young athletes who pour everything into the dream, reach the highest levels, and then find themselves with nothing when it is over. No pension, no support structure, no financial cushion, no safety net.
The Games moved on. They always do.
11. Criticism is not betrayal. It is the most loyal thing we can do.
As PE teachers, when we teach the Olympic Games across GCSE, A-level and BTEC Sport we have an opportunity and, I would argue, a responsibility to teach it critically. Not cynically or dismissively, but critically.
We already teach the gentleman amateur in the A-level specification. We already teach students that Victorian amateurism was a social construct rooted in class exclusion. The question is: Do we then connect that history to the present? Do we help students see that the ideology did not disappear when the amateur rule was formally dropped in the 1990s? Do we give them the analytical tools to ask who benefits and who doesn't from the greatest show on earth?
We can teach students to love the athletic achievement and question the economic model. We can teach them to be moved by the inspiration and still ask who profits. We can teach them that the highest form of respect for something you love is the willingness to examine it honestly and demand that it be better.
Why the taboo exists, and why I understand it
The taboo around Olympic criticism is not irrational. It exists because the Games genuinely produce joy, community and inspiration on a scale that very few human endeavours can match. When you have watched an athlete cross a finish line and seen an entire nation erupt, it feels almost churlish to start asking about broadcast rights. I understand that, as I feel it myself.And I understand that PE teachers are in a particular position. The Olympics is curriculum content. It is, for many of our students, one of the few contexts in which sport connects to something vast, shared and exciting. The last thing any of us wants is to sour that.
But we are educators. Our job is not to transmit uncritical enthusiasm. It is to develop young people who can think carefully, ask hard questions, and engage with the world as it actually is. Teaching the Olympics critically, holding the inspiration and the scrutiny in the same hand, is, I believe, exactly what great PE teaching looks like.
What a better model could look like
I am not naive enough to claim I have all the answers. But here is a starting point:
| Current Model | A Fairer Model |
| IOC retains billion-dollar reserves. | A fixed percentage of IOC reserves is directed to an athlete welfare fund. |
| Athletes receive no direct IOC payment. | A minimum living stipend is given to all athletes competing at Olympic level. |
| Political figures attach to success freely. | Formal recognition is restricted to those who fund athlete development. |
| Doping is treated as an individual moral failure. | Doping is addressed as a systemic incentive problem requiring structural reform. |
| Gentleman amateur ideology persists structurally. |
There’s genuine access regardless of financial background, globally. |
| Criticism is treated as disloyalty. |
Criticism is treated as engagement and evidence of genuine investment. |
Three things PE teachers can do:
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This week: When you next teach the Olympics, ask students this question first: "Who benefits from the Olympic Games, and how?" Then teach the full picture, including the history of amateurism as class exclusion.
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This term: Build a structured debate into your scheme of work. Motion: "The Olympic Games do more harm than good." Make students argue both sides. Make them find the evidence. Make them think.
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This year: If you teach A-level PE, consider whether your delivery of the gentleman amateur connects explicitly to the present day. The history is in the specification. The contemporary relevance is not far away. Students who can draw that line are demonstrating exactly the kind of analytical thinking that A-level PE rewards.
An invitation to disagree
I fully expect that some of you will push back on this post, and I genuinely welcome that. Perhaps you think I have overstated the economic case. Perhaps you think the connection between Victorian amateurism and modern athlete poverty is too much of a stretch. Perhaps you think I am wrong to invoke Katya's story in this context.Please tell me. Use the comments below, or email me directly. I am particularly interested in hearing from colleagues who have found ways to teach the Olympics that hold both the inspiration and the scrutiny together, because that is a genuinely difficult pedagogical challenge, and I suspect many of you are managing it better than I am.
The conversation the Olympic Games need is the one it has spent decades trying to avoid. Let's have it.
Closing
The Olympic Games are not disgusting. They are flawed, commercially captured, politically exploited, and structurally unjust to the people who make them possible. They are also genuinely inspiring, genuinely community-building, and genuinely capable of producing moments of shared human joy that almost nothing else can replicate.Both things are true, and holding both things at once, rather than retreating into uncritical adoration or reflexive cynicism, is, I believe, what intellectual honesty demands of us.
When I write posts like this, I wonder whether I'll lose readers who came for something more comfortable. I hope instead that I've given you something worth arguing about.
Thank you for reading. I'd be genuinely grateful to hear your response, especially if you disagree.
Have a wonderful week.
James