Economic and good education lead to excellent athletic ability – Imad al-Din Hussein

Is there a relationship between progress in the economy, education, health and rule of law and progress and excellence in sports?
This question is the subject of long-standing discussions between me and the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the “Shorouk” company, Engineer Ibrahim Al-Muallem, and it was renewed with the start of the Olympic Games competition in the French capital, Paris, which ended last Sunday evening.
I will not jump to the results of the question, nor will I claim to have conducted a scientific study or checked all the indicators and criteria according to which a country wins or loses. This is what we will do in “Shorouk” in a few days, God willing.
At the beginning of the course, this question had no clear answer but only a hypothesis that proved to be correct at the end, even if there were some exceptions.
For example, a cursory glance at comparing the GDP of each country to the ranking of the final medal table of the Paris Olympics will reveal the validity of the assumptions with which we began the question. Anyone who has looked at this table will see that the United States team tops the list with 126 medals, including 40 gold medals, 44 silver medals, and 42 bronze medals, and the Chinese team ranks second with the same number of gold medals, 27 silver medals, and 24 bronze medals.
Even hours before the end of the competition, China was in first place because it was ahead of the United States by one gold medal, which is the main criterion for the ranking, but the victory in the basketball gold medal put it on par with the United States. China surpassed it because of the number of silver and bronze medals.
An important point is that the medal rankings correspond to a large extent to the countries’ gross domestic product, which is the total market value of all final goods and services produced by a country in a given period. The higher the output in a calendar year, the more it indicates economic progress in terms of goods and services, which is particularly important in education, health and other services, and therefore in sports.
The United States is the world’s largest economy with a GDP of about $24 trillion, and China is second at about $17.7 trillion. Strangely, the United States led the gold medal table at the Olympics by a large margin, while China led in gold medals almost the entire game until the United States caught up with China at the last minute and surpassed China with silver and bronze medals.
This implication in sports is almost repeated in economics and may soon appear in other fields, only slightly differently. Most experts say that China is working hard to be on par with the United States economically by 2030 and may even surpass the United States after 2030, especially as it has already begun to compete with the United States in technology, which is clearly a monopoly of the United States. Both countries dominate the world in this field, and the rest of the world follows closely behind.
The third largest economy is the European Union, but Germany also ranks third with about 4.4 trillion US dollars, followed by Japan, India, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Brazil, Canada and Russia.
Anyone who follows the medal table from the Paris Olympics will see Japan third, Australia fourth, France fifth, South Korea sixth, followed by Italy, Germany, New Zealand and Canada.
It is worth noting that the ranking table based on GDP is almost the same as the medal table of G7 or G20, but there are some exceptions, such as India, which has a developed economy but does not rank high in the Olympics.
If this classification is true, citizens of many countries in the world will stop blaming themselves and their athletes for not achieving good results. They will agree on a basic rule that progress in sports must be accompanied by progress in the main areas, the most important of which are the economy, education, health and the rule of law.
Some people will say: But there are some countries that win gold medals in the Olympics, but they are at the bottom of the global economic, education and health ladder, and they don’t have any good global indicators or classifications. Field.
Yes, the above is true, and the explanation for this is that these countries have very successful individual talents and talents, and they are not the result of collective progress, such as African runners, or some people who train and live in developed countries but compete under their own national flag.
This means that without education, health and a strong economy, no country has any hope of progressing in sports, except through failure and rare talent.
Thanks again to El Gendy, Sarah Samir and Mohamed El Sayed for getting us into the Olympic medal table.