2026-02-05
8 分钟NPR.
This is The Indicator from Planet Money.
I'm Whelan Wong, and guess who's back?
Adrienne Ma.
Welcome back, Adrienne.
What's up?
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.
I know what all of those things are.
Yeah, you do.
And of course, this is a time of comparing how many medals the US gets versus other countries.
After all, athletic prowess has long been a measure of soft power in geopolitics.
For the US, this desire to prove American superiority was really strong during the Cold War.
The Soviet Union sponsored their Olympic athletes.
Americans wanted to build a system