Tired of reading the paper everyday and seeing people in the opinions section crying about the money we dedicated to our athletes instead of any number of humanitarian causes? I'm not saying that funding athletes is more important than helping those in need, but come on, people need to have some fun sometimes and properly represent their country every two or four years.

It's just frustrating to see people so disappointed in our government supporting our athletes over causes that the government helps regularly. I hope these people never order chinese, rent movies, buy books, gifts, or expensive clothes. Surely spending any extra cash on anything but those in need isn't doable.

Ya, the funny thing is that if the gov't didn't invest that money into the athletes people would be saying that our gov't doesn't support our athletes! (Which is a common accusation, actually.)

yes, it's sad. In a perfect world, athletes would get good funding.
Unfortunately this is a waaaaay below perfect world.

Look at it this way:
The amount of people who watched the Olympics is huge. The amount of people who watch sports in general is small though(of the whole population). Even less of those people actually care about the sport, rather than the entertainment value. Even less actually play the sport, and know what equipment is involved. The average person who watches the Olympics doesn't care about the years of training that went into that second or minute -long performance they just saw. We live in a very instant-reward society, so nobody really thinks how hard the Olympians have to train. Most people only care about who's first.

So you can see, for someone who isn't an athlete, it's hard to support athletes because we can't really see the point of throwing money at them. I can imagine someone saying: "why do they need money?...there's plenty of heavy rocks they can lift, plenty of space they can run".

On the other hand, a cause such as Haiti, we can see how directly our money can do some good.

Most people have a value-based system for all life's decision, and in their mind I think they view athleticism as entertainment that benefits the athlete(mostly). Other causes that have "real" perceived value come first. With money a tight resource, things are prioritized.

Just trying to explain something I've noticed over the years.