vesicles
Colonel
Well, this is my way of looking at individual sports vs, team sports.
Individual sports like swimming is simple and fast. They finish within minutes and give athletes boat load of medals. That's true. However, also because they are simple and fast, they can't keep audience entertained long enough to be commercially feasible. Thus, there is no professional leagues for these fast sports. Athletes cannot rely on their sports for a living. Expect for a few superstars, like Michael Phelps, a few of them can get good enough endorsement deals to live a comfortable life. So most of them have to find a regular jobs like the rest of us, despite being world-class athletes. So yes, they can rack up medals fast. But most of them only enjoy a two-week fame. Let's face it. Except Michael Phelps and the infamous Lochte, how many other American gold medal swimmers can you name off the top of your head? Not too many...
On the other hand, team sports are typically very complex games, which is why it takes a long time to finish a game. Because of the complexity of the game, they need to be played in multiple rounds to determine a winner, which sounds very tedious. However, exactly because of the complexity of these games, they can keep audience entertained for a long time, at least a couple hours. This makes them commercially feasible. This is why most of these team sports have professional leagues, which provide top athletes a way of living, from comfortable to flat out wealthy depending on the popularity of the sport. You may feel bad for those NBA players who had to battle for two whole weeks for a single medal to share between 15-20 people. But most of them make millions and millions and million of $$$ playing in the league.
So one side gets multiple medals in a couple days of work, enjoys only a 2-week fame but goes back to normal life. The other side battles 2 weeks for a single medal but lives in a multil-million dollar house and has maids. Which side would you pick? Not an easy choice. At least not for me.
In my opinion, sports in general is a rich's game. There is an old Chinese saying: poor scholars and rich martial artists. It means anyone including the poor gets a chance to become a scholar because of minimal monetary investment in becoming a scholar. You buy books and go to school (China in the 1980's and 19090's was poor but generated world-class scholars that matched and exceeded those in wealthy nations). On the other hand, you need to be wealthy to become a good martial artist. To be good at fighting, you need to get good nutrition to be fit physically. You need to buy equipment. You need to hire coaches to train you. Because very seldomly fighting can become a job and support you for your entirelife, you need some kind of financial security so that you can focus on the fighting. So a rich's game.
And if we make a generalization of the "martial artists", it would apply to all those who do physical activities or sports in general. So all in all, a rich's game.
This is why people always say the level of a nation's sports programs correlates with the economy of the nation.
Yes, there have been a few games that are typically won by poor countries, like long distance running. But that's not because poor countries are better at these sports. Most likely, it's because people in wealthy countries don't like these sports anymore. For instance, if they take out all sports from the Olympics and only keep 1500M running, those wealthy countries will dominate it in no time.
