It's like, we all promise we'll turn out to be better bosses than our predecessors were, and sure, maybe you can pay your people a little better and accept a smaller profit margin than your peers do -- but you can only take that so far. Unless you have the funds to keep up with what your peers are doing (be that legitimate business expenses or under-the-table deals) you'll be outcompeted and forced into bankruptcy.
And the Olympics have totally gone back on the spirit of the original games, which was about well-rounded people being awesome in a well-rounded way. But it didn't take long for professional athletes to take over and these days they're so specialized they might as well be trained monkeys.