The Indicator from Planet Money

Episode•February 5, 2026•9 min

How college sports juiced Olympic development

How did the U.S. become the Olympic powerhouse it is today? Cold War competition. The Soviet Union sponsored their athletes. But America wanted its athletes to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. It birthed an unexpected accelerator of Olympic development: College football. Stay with us now. On today’s show, how college football became an Olympic development engine. And how that engine might not be running as smoothly as it once did. Related episodes: Why the Olympics cost so much (https://www.npr.org/2024/08/01/1197967951/paris-2024-olympics-hosting-costs) You can't spell Olympics without IP (https://www.npr.org/2024/08/08/1197968045/paris-olympics-trademarks-enforcement-intellectual-property) A huge EU-India deal, Heated Rivalry, and a hefty $200k to Olympians (https://www.npr.org/2026/01/30/nx-s1-5693173/a-huge-eu-india-deal-heated-rivalry-and-a-hefty-200k-to-olympians) Why Host The Olympics? (https://www.npr.org/2021/08/05/1025310133/why-host-the-olympics) The monetization of college sports (https://www.npr.org/2022/07/19/1112316993/the-monetization-of-college-sports) For sponsor-free episodes of The Indicator from Planet Money, subscribe to Planet Money+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org (http://plus.npr.org/). Fact-checking by Sierra Juarez (https://www.npr.org/people/1268825622/sierra-juarez). Music by Drop Electric (https://dropelectric.bandcamp.com/). Find us: TikTok (https://www.tiktok.com/@planetmoney), Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/planetmoney/), Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/planetmoney), Newsletter (https://www.npr.org/newsletter/money). To manage podcast ad preferences, review the links below: See pcm.adswizz.com (https://pcm.adswizz.com) for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices (https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices) NPR Privacy Policy (https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy)

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Transcript

0:01

Npr.

0:11

This is the Indicator from Planet Money. I'm Waylon Wong, and guess who's back. Adrian Ma. Welcome back, Adrienne.

0:19

What's up? Good to be here.

0:21

It's so nice to see you again. And you know what? You are back right in time for the Olympic Winter Games, which officially kick off tomorrow in Italy. That means it's once again time to get obsessed with niche sports like luge and biathlon and to be chatting casually about triple salchows and Twizzles and figure skating.

0:39

I know what all of those things are.

0:42

Yeah, you do.

0:43

And of course, this is a time of comparing how many medals the US Gets versus other countries. After all, athletic prowess has long been a measure of soft power in geopolitics.

0:53

For the US this desire to prove American superiority was really strong during the Cold War. The Soviet Union sponsored their Olympic athletes. Americans wanted to build a system for producing Olympic champions that was based on free enterprise.

1:08

And this Cold War search for a winning business model ended up in a very American place, although not the one that policymakers were expecting.

1:17

College football has been paying for Olympic development. Olympians, hopes and dreams for the past half century.

1:24

Today on the show, we explain how college football is the engine that actually powers Olympic development in the US and why the system might be in jeopardy. Ty Danko first got into luge as a college student in the 1970s. This is a sport where you lie down on a sled that travels over 90 miles per hour on an icy track.

1:53

If you do it right, you should be able to put the sled within an inch of where you want any time. But obviously, when you begin, that's not what happens.

2:02

But Tai stuck with it. He figured it out, and he actually made it to the US Olympic team for the 1980 Winter Games. Now, at the time, Soviet controlled East Germany dominated in luge. The Americans were the underdogs, and Tai says even their gear wasn't as nice. He remembers bartering with the Europeans at competitions and Americans trading stuff like blue jeans, electronics, and even Playboy magazines in return for things like helmet visors and footwear.

2:32

I spoke a little German, and therefore I was the intermediary in a lot of these swaps. So I got a bit of a reputation early on as a guy to see if you wanted to sell something. And I got the nickname Banco Danko. You know, the Danko Bank.

2:49

That is American free enterprise at work right there.

2:52

I know. And you could argue it was this spirit that the US Government wanted to power the whole Olympic athlete pipeline. A few years before Tai competed 1975, President Gerald Ford had set up a presidential commission. Its purpose was to study how to better field amateur athletes for the Olympics and financially support them.

3:12

And remember this was during the Cold War. So it was important to the US that financial support did not come from the government that would be like the Soviets. And President Ford said in a 1976 speech that Americans had a different approach to developing Olympic athletes. Our belief in the independence of the athlete and the importance of the amateur tradition has held us back from all out government support.

3:37

The commission's work resulted in a 1978 act that put the U.S. olympic Committee in charge of all Olympic related activity in the country. The legislation also helped create national governing bodies for individual sports.

3:50

Victoria Jackson is a sports historian at Arizona State University. She says the committee had the government's blessing, but it did not have federal funding. And the US Never created a minister of sport position like a lot of other countries had.

4:04

It lent itself really well to kind of doubling down on a free market, free enterprise, private funding only approach to Olympic development in the United States.

4:16

The 1978 legislation gave the U.S. olympic Committee exclusive rights to words like Olympic as well as symbols like the Olympic rings. This meant that the organization could make money by licensing that intellectual property to corporate sponsors like Coca Cola, Nike.

4:31

Gerald Ford's commission had also envisioned that American companies would step up in other ways. Like they could fund training programs or they could hire athletes and give them paid time off the train.

4:42

Victoria says that vision did not turn into reality. And this is where college football comes in. This sport was getting huge in the US today, Division 1 football programs bring in hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue. The money comes from broadcast rights, corporate sponsorship, donations and ticket sales.

5:01

Those dollars pay for football coaches and recruitment efforts, but they also subsidize other college sports that aren't moneymakers. Victoria says the funding has turned American colleges into epicenters of recruitment and development for all kinds of top athletes.

5:14

We have elite sport development within our schools and that's paid for by a sport that's really only played in the United States, which is football.

5:23

Today, around 2/3 of American Olympians are NCAA athletes. American colleges also produce a huge number of international Olympic athletes that train in the US and then compete for their home countries.

5:35

However, this business model is coming under strain. For most of its history, the NCAA college athletes were not allowed to be paid directly. Then a few years ago, the NCAA allowed athletes to make money by licensing their name, image and likeness.

5:50

Then last year, a landmark legal settlement made it possible for schools in the NCAA's top division to directly pay athletes. Victoria says these big shifts are a worry for the national governing bodies for Olympic sports.

6:03

There's, believe me, extreme anxiety among the people at the top of those organizations because all that college football money that used to go to pay for all the other sports, more of it is staying with college football players now.

6:17

Now, in 2020, Congress set up a new commission to study the state of US Olympics and Paralympics. Dionne Kohler co chaired this commission. She's a law professor at the University of Baltimore. And one thing this commission did was it surveyed Americans on how they felt about the Olympics.

6:34

We set up this system where, you know, government involvement was considered absolutely terrible because we wanted to contrast with the Soviets. But that time has passed and we now know with the development of sport that there can be some really smart ways that government can be involved. And in fact, shouldn't government be involved? Because the truth is, our survey showed on the commission, Americans are not opposed to some taxpayer dollars being used to support Olympic and Paralympic athletes. Because we in the United States like winners.

7:08

We should know governments in other western countries, from Australia to the UK to Canada, do provide financial support to their Olympians. The model is fairly unique and has led to some difficult financial circumstances for a lot of athletes.

7:22

About a quarter of Olympians and Paralympians earn less than $15,000 a year. And only around 12% of Olympic athletes have any kind of sponsorship deal.

7:32

Dion says a lot of athletes have to rely on family support, and that means athletes with fewer resources can get excluded all the way down to the youth level.

7:41

Youth sports is now getting so expensive that it's really going to exacerbate issues with our Olympic Pipel want our Olympic and Paralympic movement to be sort of only for the upper middle class, the wealthy. We want it to be that truly the best kids can grow into those athletes.

8:00

Now both Dion and sports historian Victoria Jackson say there are different ways the government could support Olympic athletes. For example, it could offer a kind of Medicare program so athletes could get better access to health insurance.

8:13

Or the government could set aside some revenue from federal taxes on sports betting. Victoria says this money could fund athletic facilities at American colleges with the condition that they be opened up for community access. That way people who aren't students can still use those facilities to train.

8:31

So I could like go to my local luge facility.

8:34

Oh, yeah, luge facilities for everyone.

How college sports juiced Olympic development

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