Olimpic Slavery

After reading this article about the Winter Olympics and it's incredible resemblance to The Hunger Games, I had a chance to reflect about the slave-ish similarities that olympic athletes experience. Written by a luge professional, it's clear in the article that her experience proved how toilsome an athlete's career is. 

I believe it's absurd the way that athletes have to depend on corporate sponsorship because it takes over athletes' lives and limits their freedom to do certain things. I can only imagine how terrible this woman's childhood could have been if she was working as an athlete for the US. Being a little girl, she was just as any other adult worker in America, yet she wasn't getting paid decently - or paid at all for that matter. Corporate sponsorship can really exploit these athletes' capacity to work and train. In her case, Verizon was simply owning her. She was not allowed to go to public events without mentioning the company's name. Basically, she became a Verizon spokesperson. 

I can definitely see the similarity with The Hunger Games. She is just like another Katniss Everdeen. They both left everything behind: childhood, free time, studies. And additionally, they weren't even getting the right compensation for that.  What's really sad is how some athletes don't even receive any corporate sponsorship or even government help, an so their only way to be able to go to the olympics is to work and train at the same time, which is an incredibly horrendous combination considering that training is already an arduous job. I simply feel that olympic athletes are a version of slaves, who are unjustly treated relative to their input of work. As the author would agree, athletes and people aware of the problem are the only ones who can do something to change this.