According to the Olympic Charter, everyone should be able to compete in the Olympics without facing discrimination. But a recent study from the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Kinesiology and Physical Education confirms that the majority of competitors are white and wealthy.
While most might be aware of this bias, formal studies have been lacking and past researchers have only studied the wealth of countries participating in the Olympics. This is the first comprehensive study at the individual athlete level.
“I studied the prevalence of white and privately educated athletes in comparison to the general population,” says Dr. David Lawrence, a staff physician at the Faculty’s David L. MacIntosh Sport Medicine Clinic. “There have been many anecdotal reports highlighting the potential disparity in participation, but no one has formally studied it. I think the degree to which race and wealth play a role in elite sport might be surprising.”
To conduct the study, Lawrence collected photos and school data for 568 athletes from the 2014 Sochi Winter Games and 1,643 athletes from the 2016 Rio Summer Olympic Games. He focused on athletes from Canada, US, Great Britain and Australia.
At Rio 2016, 81.7 per cent of athletes were white and 32.7 per cent were privately educated, which is a relative marker of wealth according to Lawrence. At Sochi 2014, 94.9 per cent of athletes were white and 30.3 per cent were privately educated.
Lawrence also discovered that more winter than summer athletes were white.
His findings were recently published in the journal Public Health.
Lawrence hopes that by bringing awareness to this issue, he can help shed light on how to reduce barriers to participation and advancement within sport.
“A major barrier to participation in many sports is access to wealth. Participating in many sports is costly and the financial burden only increases with advancement – whether it’s equipment, access to facilities or time requirements for both parents and the children,” says Lawrence.
In the future, Lawrence would like to find more effective ways to promote physical activity and health in the general population. Research has shown that the public funding given to Olympic athletes doesn’t necessarily promote health in a broader sense, as many people believe.
“Initiatives aimed at increasing physical activity in the general population should target the general population, including increasing access to green space, recreational facilities and public programming. I want to start an honest discussion about the value we place on Olympic sports and explore more effective ways to get people moving.”