The TVP Sport editorial team published a 45-second clip of the “7 dni sport” program on the X portal. The words spoken by Otylia Jędrzejczak, our Olympic swimming champion and now the president of the Polish Swimming Association, caused a great response. Unfortunately, most of them were negative, because Jędrzejczak was involved in football unnecessarily.
– We have no tradition of showing Olympic champions, showing players with great results – said the former Olympic champion. – That these Olympic successes would be something really, really significant. Considering that sports are still a niche thing. We watch football. We say that everyone is fascinated by it. We go to the stands even when they lose. And we have many other beautiful sports that actually have their own small fans in a given period and are shown once every four years.
– I sense what you’re getting at. That is, how to make sure that they are paid as well as the players – reacted Piotr Sobczyński, a journalist of TVP Sport, which caused the president of the Polish Football Association to laugh.
And this is where, unfortunately, the shared recording ends, which is a pity, because after a while, amused by Sobczyński’s vision, Jędrzejczak says: “It’s going to be hard.” This proves that it is not detached from reality, as the previous course of the discussion suggested.
The football team is also heading towards the margins
This out-of-context fragment made many football fans angry at our former great swimmer. Where do kayakers and swimmers compare to the popularity of ball kickers?
I must admit that I also misjudged our Olympic champion. I thought he longed for a world that was long gone. And which I only know from my father’s stories. It was a world in which 100,000 people sat at the Tenth Anniversary Stadium to watch the Poland-USA athletics match. Fans fought for tickets to the matches of the Polish boxing team. And if someone went out into nature in May, they had to take a battery-powered radio with them to listen to the broadcast from the Peace Race. Yes, there were times when the mainstream of Polish sport consisted of more sports disciplines than just Kamil Stoch, Robert Lewandowski and Iga Świątek. And if we compare the experience of Polish Olympic successes back then to the current ones, sport in Poland has indeed become a niche. Well, maybe apart from ski jumping and national football. Although, after the last bonus scandal, Polish staff also chose to move towards the margins.
No more running for a hot meal voucher
To those who were outraged by Otylia Jędrzejczak that she wanted Olympians to earn like football players, I assure you that they have drawn the wrong conclusions. That’s not what this discussion was about. Tomasz Majewski, the current head of the Polish Athletics Association, and Przemysław Babiarz, a TVP Sport journalist, also participated in the conversation that took place in the “7 dni sport” program.
The starting point of the program was the decision of the world athletics federation that it would pay a $50,000 bonus to each gold medalist of the Olympic Games in Paris. This is a groundbreaking decision. Until now, the remuneration of Olympic athletes was solely the responsibility of the national Olympic committees or the governments of individual countries, which decided on bonuses for medals. Even some of the richest ones – such as Sweden, Norway or Great Britain – did not pay Olympians for their successes at all. For the first time in history, the federation decided to share with athletes the money paid by the International Olympic Committee for the games.
And the discussion in the studio was about how to reward the Olympians. For example, you could find out that the Polish Olympic Committee had prepared bonuses for our medalists that amounted to PLN 50,000. dollars doesn’t seem like a very lucrative prize. Or that Canadians envied Poles the support that Olympic athletes receive here. And I will repeat once again, no one demanded that Olympians from less popular sports earn money like football players. Piotr Sobczyński’s interjection was a joke, a kind of hyperbole that no one in the studio took seriously. The conclusion was rather that the times when athletes performed for a second-class train ticket and a hot meal voucher were over. This is how Sebastian Coe, the current head of World Athletics, recalls his performances for Great Britain, who understands perfectly well that “the world has changed.”
Today the games are held every day. You don’t have to wait four years
Coming back to Otylia Jędrzejczak’s desire “for these Olympic successes to be something really, really significant”, I don’t have good news. Today the games are held every day. You don’t have to wait four years anymore. The widespread use of television broadcasts has brought major events within reach. Not only sports, because the format of a sports event has penetrated into entertainment. The competition takes place not only on the pitch, but also on the dance floor in “Dancing with the Stars” or on the stage in some “Battle of Voices” or “Idol”. In many places, shows of this type have replaced films and series from prime time, which are now watched in a completely different way than they were 10-15 years ago. “The world has changed.”
Even the Americans, who have many great Olympic champions, did not declare any of them the athlete of the year in the year of the Tokyo games. This title in the most prestigious Associated Press poll went to a baseball player. Shohei Ohtani won, although his Los Angeles Angels team lost more games than they won and did not qualify for the MLB playoffs.
2024-04-24 08:04:00
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