During the Rio Olympics, Malcolm Gladwell and Nicholas Thompson will be discussing the track-and-field events, as they did during the 2012 London Games and during the 2015 World Championships. Below is Part I. You can also now read part II, about Usain Bolt, Mo Farah, and Wayde Van Niekerk.

Nicholas Thompson**:** Hello, Malcolm! It’s a delight to be talking about Olympic track with you once more. The events start today and, as usual, I’m looking forward to watching people doing basic human things—running, jumping, throwing—in superhuman ways. And I expect Team U.S.A. to do rather well, though not nearly as well as the swimmers and gymnasts.

Malcolm Gladwell**:** I’ve actually been dreading these Olympics. I think the Games have become too big, too expensive, too logistically complicated, and too overwhelming for any one country—let alone any one city—to manage. And I’m not the only one, surely, to find it sickening that absolutely everyone is making money off these Games except the athletes. NBC will make a fortune. The hospitality and construction industries of Rio will make a fortune. And don’t get me started on the I.O.C.: the Olympic Committee members are getting a per diem of nine hundred dollars—which means that they will make more over the two weeks than ninety-nine per cent of the athletes at the Games will make during the entire year. At a certain point these spectacles cease being joyous and beautiful and start to stink. That said, I’m going to watch every single minute of the running. As in so many things, I’m a hypocrite!

N.T.****: Huh. I see your point. (Though maybe you can take solace in the fact that NBC’s ratings for the Olympics are dismal?) Still, on the scale of the world’s current injustices, the underpayment of Olympic athletes seems relatively small. And isn’t it good that the construction and hospitality industries of Brazil are making money? In any event, to me, what’s beautiful about the Olympics vastly outweighs what’s cruel. So, like you, I’m going to watch every single minute of the running, but I’m not going to feel guilty doing it.

M.G.****: Not “underpayment,” Nick. Nonpayment. And, yes, it’s a small injustice relative to, say, what’s happening in Syria. But that is precisely the kind of moral calculation that the I.O.C. fat cats are relying on to maintain the status quo. There is, in fact, a very important principle here—one that other parts of the economy—I’m looking at you, Wall Street and Silicon Valley—ought to heed. And that is, in any flourishing concern, profits ought to flow to those generating the greatest value. If millions of people find Katie Ledecky’s accomplishments so extraordinary that they tune in to the Olympics night after night, then Katie Ledecky deserves some share of that income. In a perfect world, the best athletes in the world would get together, after Rio, and announce, “We’re taking the Games back.” What would happen if Allyson Felix and Michael Phelps stood up and said, “Enough is enough!”?

N.T.****: Phelps has done O.K. His net worth before these games was about fifty-five million dollars, and it’s going to be a hell of a lot more after the way he swam this week. But your general point is totally true. U.S. Swimming apparently pays its top athletes three thousand dollars a year. And Gabby Douglas’s mother had to file for bankruptcy because of the cost of supporting her career. It’s like the exploitation in college football, where the coaches are paid in the seven figures and the athletes, who actually make the teams succeed, put their brains at risk and can’t accept a free burger. Still, we’re going to lose all of our readers if we focus on economics too long, and I don’t want to divert you into a discussion of banning college football. So let’s move to the athletes, and one of the most important to watch: Caster Semenya, the South African middle-distance star, who has what are called “intersex conditions.” She has always identified as a woman, but she has many of the physiological features of a man, including, according to a medical report in 2009 that was leaked to the press, internal testes and an exceptionally high testosterone level. Do you think she should be allowed to compete as a woman?

M.G.****: Of course not! And why do I say of course not? Because not a single track-and-field fan that I’m aware of disagrees with me. I cannot tell you how many arguments I’ve gotten into over the past two weeks about this, and I’ve been astonished at how many people fail to appreciate the athletic significance of this. Remember, this is a competitive issue, not a human-rights issue. No one is saying that Semenya isn’t a woman, a human being, and an individual deserving of our full respect.

N.T.****: This is slightly beside the point, but the controversy has led many people to say many cruel things, among them that she is not, in fact, a woman. As her father has said, “This is all very painful for us—we live by simple rules.”

M.G.****: Absolutely, Nick. There is no place for that kind of viciousness. But people need to understand that an athletic competition has to have rules; otherwise there can be no competition. David Epstein wrote a characteristically brilliant piece for Scientific American last week in which he quoted the philosopher Bernard Suits, who once described sports as “the voluntary acceptance of unnecessary obstacles.” And that’s what’s at issue here. Semenya is equipped with an extraordinary and anomalous genetic advantage. The previous policy of international track was that she could compete as a woman if she took medication to lower her testosterone to “normal” levels. That restriction has now been lifted. And so we have a situation where one woman, born with the biological equivalent of a turbocharger, is now being allowed to “compete” against the ninety-nine per cent of women who have no such advantage. The physiologist Ross Tucker had a wonderful piece on this issue recently, and it’s worth—I think—quoting from it at length: