Olympic Calculus

Recently I traveled out to San Francisco to give a little speech to the members of the US Olympic Committee's Athlete Advisory Committee (the USOC's AAC, for those who like acronyms). While leaping the hurdle of my fear of public speaking was no small feat, I was grateful for the opportunity to address such a talented audience on a topic about which I am bottomlessly passionate. While the majority of the speech took the form of a series of stories, the last minute or two was consumed by a review of the below calculus.

The entire speech, should you be brave (or bored) enough to read it, can be found on the Scripts page of In the Arena's website. Here's the coda:

Let’s do the Olympic math, shall we?

• 537 US athletes competed in Athens. Another 211 competed in Torino. That’s just shy of 750 US athletes participating in an Olympic cycle.

• And for every one of those athletes who made the team, it’s probably safe to assume that there were two other athletes who were vying for that spot and who also had a legitimate shot at making it. That’s 2,250 athletes.

• If you take 25% of those 2,250 out of the picture because they’re NBA or NHL stars and they’re financially solvent or they’re running their own foundations; and you take another 25 or 30 or even 40% out of the equation because they either have yet to earn their college degrees, have no interest in civic engagement or quite simply, wouldn’t pass the character test to qualify them as superlative mentors; you’re still left with 1,000 athletes.

• If, over the course of a four-year period, each of those athletes spends an average of two years on the Roster, and in each of those years they’re able to touch the lives of 500 children (which is the number In the Arena’s current athletes are achieving), then that’s a thousand athletes positively impacting the lives of a thousand kids.

• In a single Olympic cycle, that’s a million children –a million children—who have a better chance at success as a result of the opportunity to be mentored by an aspiring Olympian.

I’m an English major by trade, but I like that math. And so the question I ask myself every day is: Why not? Why not try to bring about that large-scale change? What is the worst that could happen?