For what it’s worth, there are more people at the summer Olympics than the winter ones (~10,500 in Paris and ~2,900 at Milan according to Wikipedia) but still one would think there should at least be 1/4 as much if they’re just looking at athlete numbers alone.

this is how you get more olympians.

If enough people are in the market, have egg or sperm donor companies call people who medal.

considers

Looking down the road, because my expectation is that sooner or later, we’re going to be doing human genetic engineering, a company getting Olympian genetic material like that might be — as long as they can operate in a legal jurisdiction that doesn’t prohibit human genetic engineering — better off just calling up medalists and licensing their DNA. I don’t think that you can copyright DNA under current US case law, though it might be patentable.

investigates

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_genetic_sequences

As of 2016, genetic sequences were not recognized as copyrightable subject matter by any jurisdiction.[3] The United States Copyright Office’s position is that “DNA sequences and other genetic, biological, or chemical substances or compounds, regardless of whether they are man-made or produced by nature,” are ideas, systems, or discoveries rather than copyrightable works of authorship.[15]: 23

You might not need to copyright or patent it, though, if you can just keep the changes you make secret. I mean, you get sperm/egg from Random Person, you do your proprietary modifications, you generate an embryo, you implant. I’m not sure how hard it would be for some other company to reverse-engineer the changes by looking at people’s DNA relative to background noise in the DNA.

searches

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33095042/

A large majority of countries (96 out of 106) surveyed have policy documents-legislation, regulations, guidelines, codes, and international treaties-relevant to the use of genome editing to modify early-stage human embryos, gametes, or their precursor cells. Most of these 96 countries do not have policies that specifically address the use of genetically modified in vitro embryos in laboratory research (germline genome editing); of those that do, 23 prohibit this research and 11 explicitly permit it. Seventy-five of the 96 countries prohibit the use of genetically modified in vitro embryos to initiate a pregnancy (heritable genome editing). Five of these 75 countries provide exceptions to their prohibitions. No country explicitly permits heritable human genome editing.

The thing is that in practice, if you want in vitro implantation, you can probably just travel abroad to a jurisdiction that doesn’t prohibit it, unless countries assert extraterritorial jurisdiction that attaches to their citizens. If someone wants an Olympianized kid, I imagine that traveling abroad isn’t that much additional barrier. Extraterrorial jurisdiction exists, but it is very rare; prohibitions on child sex tourism are one notable example that a number of countries do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraterritorial_jurisdiction

EDIT: Replaced the text and citation for the legal overview, as it looks like the earlier link was to a spam site that copied it.