How college sports juiced Olympic development
The Indicator from Planet Money
NPR
4.7 • 9.5K Ratings
🗓️ 5 February 2026
⏱️ 9 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On today’s show, how college football became an Olympic development engine. And how that engine might not be running as smoothly as it once did.
Related episodes:
Why the Olympics cost so much
You can't spell Olympics without IP
A huge EU-India deal, Heated Rivalry, and a hefty $200k to Olympians
Why Host The Olympics?
The monetization of college sports
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | NPR. |
| 0:02.0 | This is the indicator from Planet Money. |
| 0:13.6 | I'm Whalen Wong and guess who's back? |
| 0:16.4 | Adrienne Ma! |
| 0:17.6 | Welcome back, Adrienne. |
| 0:19.4 | What's up? |
| 0:20.5 | Good to be here. It's so nice to see you again. And you know what? You are back right in time for the Olympic Winter Games, which officially kick off tomorrow in Italy. That means it's once again time to get obsessed with niche sports like luge and biathlon and to be chatting casually about triple sow cows and twizzles and figure skating. |
| 0:39.8 | I know what all of those things are. |
| 0:42.2 | Yeah, you do. |
| 0:43.3 | And of course, this is a time of comparing how many medals the U.S. gets versus other countries. |
| 0:49.1 | After all, athletic prowess has long been a measure of soft power in geopolitics. |
| 0:53.8 | For the U.S., this desire to prove |
| 0:55.9 | American superiority was really strong during the Cold War. The Soviet Union sponsored their |
| 1:01.8 | Olympic athletes. Americans wanted to build a system for producing Olympic champions that was |
| 1:07.0 | based on free enterprise. And this Cold War search for a winning business model |
| 1:11.5 | ended up in a very American place, |
| 1:13.9 | although not the one that policymakers were expecting. |
| 1:17.0 | College football has been paying for Olympic development, |
| 1:21.1 | Olympians' hopes and dreams for the past half century. |
| 1:24.2 | Today on the show, we explain how college football is the engine that actually powers |
| 1:29.1 | Olympic development in the U.S. and why the system might be in jeopardy. |
| 1:43.3 | Tai Danco first got into Luge as a college student in the 1970s. |
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