In a very recent ST article about gold medalist Shani Davis...

• Image by Mingo

The 27-year-old Chicago native skates with such grace and precision. He's a perfectionist, mastering his turns, doing whatever he must to trim a millisecond off his times. He's a fascinating sports figure, but he's as mysterious as he is gifted.

He coaches himself most of the time. He finds his own sponsors. He refuses to be a part of the United States' team pursuit, which has created controversy in the past two Olympics. He is the founder, president, CEO and publicist of Team Shani. And Team Shani's only mission is for you to appreciate watching him skate. Then leave him alone.

By staying independent, not being a part of the "team America," securing his own sponsors, and personally managing the rewards of his genetic and learned talents, Shani Davis is only being consistent with the neoliberal program. He sees himself not as a human but as human capital—the main subject of the ninth chapter of Michel Foucault's excellent The Birth of Politics.

Because I do not have the book with me (it's at home), I will use this quote from a paper ("Managing Human Capital") by Professor Isleide Arruda Fontenelle to explain the human capital concept:

Based on this perspective, in his last piece of writing, “Naissance de la biopolitique,” the result of a course he taught at Collège de France in the late 1970s and which was published after his death, Foucault (2004) examines the analysis of neoliberalism and the radical change it promotes not only in the relations between the state and the market, but especially in the new relations between the market and the individual. In other words, in addition to presenting the new role the market plays, and the power it has to have social life revolve around its logic, Foucault resorts to the theory of human capital and to the conceptual shift this theory had on the concept of “homo oeconomicus,” or economic man.
In so doing, he argues that with neoliberalism we would be “facing a reconfiguration of the state and society, based on the market’s paramount principle, which is competition and not exchange, as in the origins of political economics”