Every two years I let myself get a little nationalistic. I really enjoy the olympics. I’m heading to Rio in a week, any Brazilian ancaps want to grab a drink let me know.

The United States Olympic team is one of the only teams (I can’t find the two others alluded to in this article (Archive)) that does not receive government funding.

Of course it’s not a slam dunk for the issues of centalization, there are counter examples like how the men’s gymnastics team isn’t dominating. The US being the wealthiest and third largest country in the world certialny isn't hurting things either. However, I found a few points from this article to be very interesting: Why the U.S. women's gymnastics team will win just about everything in Rio (Archive)

"In the past, the dominant teams were those with centralized programs, and everyone thought that was best."

"European coaches come here, and they look around the gym for the best one or two athletes. In the U.S., we work with everyone. There aren't grassroots programs left in those former powerhouse countries. There is no feeder system, and now we're seeing the results of that. We could have predicted this shift 30 years ago."

Did these countries have a lot of grassroots to begin with?

There has been a change in scoring which has altered the ideal body type for a female gymnast. The average age of US gymnastics athletes has gone from 17.7 to 19.2. In the 2008 Olympics there was major controversy over the Chinese forging documents (Archive) because there was an advantage to having younger girls (under 16) compete. This is what the 2008 team looked like. How do they look this year? Not quite as small and young but they still have people questioning their ages.

Compare to US gymnast Aly Raisman: Probably NSFW ESPN shoot where they highlight various Olympian body types with photo shoots of naked athletes.

Some speculation on my part, I’m willing to bet the centralized Chinese program didn’t get the bottom up market signalling that their style of athlete was on the way out. The coaches kept going with what they knew. The state recruited specific types of girls and when the "market" changed the Chinese had girls of a specific type locked into the pipeline. The US with it’s decentralized system of for profit gyms had a large pool of girls the team could pivot too.

We'll always have people calling for more centralization.