The top 100 athletes in every sport could sit out the Olympics, and the TV ratings and corporate sponsorship would take only a slight dip.

Given that it is not a free market operation to being with, but rather a money extraction operation based on political pull, we could do without the supply and demand lessons.

It would be interesting to ask the tax payers if they think that executives deserve to take home all of their money while the athletes that they actually enjoy watching get none of it.

If everyone on the IOC executive worked for free without any access to their expense accounts there still would be barely anything left for each individual athlete just for competing, especially if like Team USA their local government wasn't prepared to subsidise things either. So it's really nothing to do with monopoly power either. Olympic athletes are poorly compensated because there are an awful lot of them, and most of them only get a few minutes (sometimes only a few seconds) exposure at the highest level per decade in front of audiences that enjoy watching other sports on a weekly basis

As for the athletes people enjoy watching well enough to know their name and buy their preferred hair gel, the free market means they're compensated pretty well for their brand in individual sponsorship deals. Trouble is, there aren't many Olympians that are household names, especially the ones that really need the money.

[1]sure, local taxpayers often end up underwriting an Olympics after the planners overspend on infrastructure, but that's nothing to do with what goes into the IOC president's expense account, or indeed what the athletes get

It does actually, unfortunately: https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2016/may/11/tokyo-olympic-...

Actually, I suspect that part of the justification for the IOC executives' lavish officially-sanctioned, sponsorship-funded expense accounts is to limit the ability of bidding nations to curry favour with less obviously corrupt "free hospitality" arrangements that apparently were common in the 90s. (You're less likely to feel obliged towards someone for the offer of free flights and a five star hotel for your fact finding mission if you could charge it to your Amex card anyway) Whether it actually works is another question...

Over-estimating the power of marketing is a time-honored tradition among developers and engineers. Ironically, they also tend to view marketers as clods without any real skills. Weird divergence there. But I digress.

What is the marketing message of the Olympics? That the world's best athletes are competing against each other. If that is obviously and demonstrably not true, then the marketing fails. Contrary to popular belief, customers actually are not bad at sniffing out BS in their preferred products.

Might not work. Remember the XFL? Arena football with lousy, underpaid players. Canceled after one season.

Supply and demand. The Olympics is the only place that cares about their rare talent. It's not like they can shop around for a better offer.

None of them are inherently amazing. They just work a lot.

If no-one bothered training we'd still have an Olympics, it'd just be slower.

The major difficulty with the idea of "natural talent" is that every time someone points to a skill/whatever and says, "this is natural talent" someone else finds a way to teach that skill. Here is one paper: http://talentdevelop.com/articles/ITROM.html

You said

>The major difficulty with the idea of "natural talent" is that every time someone points to a skill/whatever and says, "this is natural talent" someone else finds a way to teach that skill.

Can anyone be trained to run as fast as Bolt or would they have to be naturally talented in the first place to be trainable?

"Talent" is usually a catch-all for innate features distinct from trained features. ("Body shape" has both innate and trained elements.)