The city of Los Angeles is set to host the 2028 Summer Olympics. And despite still being many years away, the individual athletes and teams are well on their way in terms of training—hoping to get that gold medal around their necks.

Part of the reason it matters is because aside from individual achievement, the medal count is a real point of pride for every country.

In fact, during the Olympic Games, almost every news media keeps a running total on its front page of how many medals each country has won.

In 2024, the USA won the overall medal count. Our athletes earned a total of 126 medals—35 more medals than second place China. But, if you only look at gold medals, we actually tied with China, with both countries getting 40.

That might be good enough for some, but in 2028, we as a country should accept nothing less than complete victory. That means American athletes need to step it up to win as many gold medals as possible.

To that end, we should discuss a sport that American athletes are having difficulty competing in: racewalking. At the Paris Olympics, no American athletes qualified to compete.

Not only did no Americans win, we failed to even qualify to compete.

However, many people don’t know that besides racewalking being one of the longest-running (pun intended) events held in modern-era Olympics, the sport was allegedly also the most popular in the United States at the end of the 19th century—only to have its popularity completely fall off a cliff.

In order to make sense of this sport I spoke with professor Jeff Salvage. He is a lifelong racewalker, a coach to many top Olympic contenders, and the founder and CEO of racewalk.com, which served as the U.S. racewalking committee’s official website for nearly a decade.

Join host Roman Balmakov on this week’s episode of “Facts Matter.”

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and guests and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.