Why do you care if they get medals or not?
The medal is meaningless to you. To them it's a memento of getting selected for and participating in the Mosconi cup. Who knows, mabye some of them sell theirs or throw it away. Who bloody cares?
I know people who threw away all of their gold medals for pool playing. It had no significance to them, what so ever. Not small tropies, by any means. I also know some other people that would be buried with any kind of medal received for any level of pool playing.
Why do you have to make everything political, and why do you try to twist everything to make the past some glorious time in history that will never be surpassed? Old people have been doing this stuff for thousands of years allready. The same exact thing was going on in ancient Greece. Time changes, people don't. People are lazy, stupid, smart, industrious or whatever they may be, today as much as they were yesterday. Things are not like when you were young, you are no longer young. Get the hxxl over it. Here, watch this, maybe you'll laugh and recognize yourself:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe1a1wHxTyo
This is the Mosconi cup. It's got some prestige and it is somewhat indicative of skill, but it's not the be all and end all of pool, nor our society as a whole.