Final Word from Monday, August 13, 2012
Strong medal counts at the London Olympics by the U.S. and the
U.K. show that Western models of training and funding sports
can still compete against the Chinese and fading Soviet models.
For Czechs, one of the big questions now is whether the success
of this year's Olympics can be repeated after the retirement of
the athletes and coaches who grew to greatness thanks to the
Communist-era system. Over the past 20 years, Czechs have
been mainly world-calibre in the theft of national assets, which
must eventually show up in such quotidian affairs as sports. With
the big and little godfathers now controlling so much of the
economy, a sports infrastructure that doesn't benefit from this
enormous concentration of wealth is going to be short-changed.
Success at future Olympics is more in the hands of this state
within a state than the ČSTV sports union or the Czech Olympic
Committee.[Czech Republic Five Families Summer]
Glossary of difficult words
medal count - the number of medals won by each country, usually depicted as a chart;
to fade - to gradually grow faint and disappear;
quotidian - ordinary or everyday;
short-changed - treated unfairly by having something of value withheld.