Nowadays, it kind of feels like Olympics are just annoying. Propaganda fest for authoritarian regimes. No one cares. Heck, some people don’t even know that the Olympics are even happening.
How did it go so wrong?
In the 21st century, we interact with the rest of the world on a daily basis. You can learn more about any destination online (heck, on Wikipedia alone) than you would from traveling there for a few days to watch some random assortment of sporting activities.
And I think to some extent we're so used to having everything at our fingertips that sometimes actually going to the destination is less rewarding than one would expect--spend a ton of money (vs. going on the internet 'for free'), deal with customs, deal with the occasional crying kid on the plane, maybe forget to bring an item you really needed, maybe get mugged or lose your passport, have issues with your hotel reservation...
Not to mention the opportunity cost. Compare the number of, say, Summer activities one could consider instead of going to the Olympics in 1952 vs 2022. If anything we suffer from too many alternatives today
Plus there's no Cold War to raise the stakes to the point where anything but the gold medal wins utter defeat.
And frankly I'd wager most people aren't that into nationalism anymore, except maybe the alt-right and its equivalents elsewhere. "I'm just trying to get through the week" trumps all else for most people.
I have to disagree here.
The amount of politics and rivalry between authoritarian vs. non-authoritarian regimes is the same as it was in the past
Now I think I’ve had enough of it, and would rather have familiarity and harmony. I began to resent diversity actually.
I don’t resent the UK and US for becoming like this though: I feel you can have the best of both worlds. London for instance is a very international city, but even if you venture even half an hour out of the M25 you’ll find very homogenous neighbourhoods (in fact, this is even true within London now that I think about it).
I grew up in a different country--not the US, China or Russia. We typically hope to get a half dozen medals and a gold would be a Big Deal.
As a result, if you turn on the TV, you get random coverage of any of the hundreds of individual competitions. Modern pentathlon! The one where they jump on a trampoline! Handball!
There are so many sports that it's non-stop coverage. Also, because it's live, whenever someone from your home country has a chance to medal it's a big deal: everyone stops doing what they are doing to watch TV. Collectively. It's an "event".
It's really fun and--this is key-- emotional. Not just to watch your country medal but all of the other sports, winners, losers, etc.
In the US the TV coverage is garbage. It's 100% US-centric, which would be excusable (if shortsighted, because it's less fun and emotional). Worse, it's not even live, which makes it less special. And they don't show any sports where the US isn't competitive, which makes it less novel and fun.
The sibling comments here are absolutely right - the US coverage is terrible compared to the quality of the output of other broadcasters.
The problem is that US audiences only want to watch American competitors and most popular sports here are ones where the majority of teams and players are American. The Olympics isn't about one country and so to focus all of your coverage just on your own country creates a very tilted output, esp when America isn't featured in a final. Whole sports are not covered because there is no American competing, and to not show a final because no Americans made it through is just absurd.
For comparison, the BBC shows every heat/round from every sport. Some of it is online only or via the red button (extra channels via digital TV we don't have in the US) but they show it and commentate on it. And with no ads.
Sports like Formula 1 are not popular in the US because there are no American drivers and the single American team is hardly American (based in Europe, currently has Russian flag livery due to weird sponsorship deal). But we'll know when Americans start watching sports for the pleasure of competition and not for nationalistic reasons because sports like F1 will become more popular organically.
I think there's a [citation needed] here. This is what people think is true, but I'd argue is wrong--as evidenced by a collapse in viewership!
People want entertainment that is fun and emotional, and the US coverage isn't providing that, perhaps because they are constrained by thinking that US audiences only care about US athletes.
Is this an established fact, or just a widespread belief among US broadcasters?
And yes, the BBC Olympics coverage is awesome. During the London games, I chose to pay for a proxy service so that I could use iPlayer and catch the BBC rather than suffer through NBC's useless attempt.
Forgot to add advertising in the US is out of control.
- America has just so many participants so it makes some sense that 100% coverage is on US athletes
- too much focus on personal side of things (X just had a baby etc.) is becuase US gets regular news-people/non-expert commentators. Since they don't often know much about the sport, they make everything into a personal interest stories.
How other countries do it:
- focus on the sport
- former athletes of the sport in question are brought in
Obviously they should cover US athletes when they are participating but they cover them all the time. It's just more boring.
For example, they set up the HD cameras and trailer at the ski jumping venue. They showed ski jumping start to finish—all the competitors real-time without editing. The commentators were ski jumping experts, since the professional commentators were all off on the SD feeds. Almost no breaks because they only had one HD commercial.
I learned so much about the sport and cheered for competitors from random countries. It was miles beyond the standard NBC coverage and probably even better than watching it in person.
20 years later and it’s the most memorable Olympics-watching experience of my life, going back my earliest memory of the jetpack in ‘84.
Unfortunately, the networks have gotten "smarter". I can watch things in 4k this year, but it's the traditional coverage, so it's crap content with 4k and HDR. :(
It seems like the macro trend of network television spectacle events is on the decline and probably due to the internet. The decline in ratings happens across many domains:
- sports: NFL Super Bowl football viewership declines[1], MLB baseball, NASCAR racing, Olympics, etc
- awards shows: Academy Awards, Grammy Awards
- morning shows and evening newscasts on all networks NBC/ABC/CBS, etc
Both the internet (Netflix, Youtube, etc) and a demographic shift means events like the Olympics is not a big deal anymore. Yes, the Olympics committee has scandals but everything on network tv has been on a long term decline.
The 1950s television sets shifted audiences out of movie theaters. The 1940s era of "Gone With The Wind" and "Casablanca" represented the peak movie theater attendance for % of population. Now the internet is shifting audiences away from tv specials including the Olympics.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/09/sports/football/super-bow....
I predict that the networks will either adapt or die as their remaining audience does as well.
That makes it hard for a city in a free society to want to be the host. The costs are very real but the benefits are elusive. Probably the last time the Olympics were profitable to the host city was the 1984 Los Angeles games and that was because Los Angeles was able to drive a hard bargain because nobody wanted to host the Olympics after the terrorism at the 1972 games.
Some people have suggested we might be better off if the Olympics were held in the same place(s) every year, maybe in Greece.
Now it seems like even the authoritarian nations are deciding it's to expensive and you see responsible democracies getting back in with more realistic bids.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Olympic_Games_host_cit...
The event had commercial sponsors such as Coke and McDonald's plastered everywhere, which was derided at the time. The opening ceremony even prominently featured Chevy pickup trucks [1].
Nearly all of the newly built facilities were then reused as Georgia Tech dormitories, professional sporting stadiums, local high school facilities, etc.
It was a huge inflection point for the city's growth.
[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?t=26m16s&v=4n0a-yNO8fE up to the "How Y'all Doin'!" at 30:04
The 1994 winter olympics in Norway did make a profit.[0]
[0] https://www.nrk.no/ytring/mytene-og-sannheten-om-ol-1.111989...
What a wonderful city! And amazing port / beach transformation.
The question is why those locations don't win? I'm sure it's due to corruption within the Olympic organization, but who am I to judge. I just stop watching the crap.
I think this is first worlders thinking "democracy = the West".
Partially it is corruption, partially it is that most democratic places want to limit IOC's powers and then many areas try, but are held back by the population by large campaigns against it.
Edit: I just found a fascinating detail on the Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NBC_Olympic_broadcasts#Mike_Ti... which points out that NBC doesn't want Olympics coverage to cannibalize their Super Bowl viewership, which is more profitable.
As noted in another comment NBC is an absolutely terrible steward of the broadcasts in the US, but they spent the money to help prop up their football investment.
The second is that the IOC is driven by greed, and dictatorships have money while craving any legitimacy they can get on the world stage. It’s been shown in multiple studies (sorry I don’t have time to look them up offhand) that only a few cities have managed to pivot the Olympics required investment into a profit by any measure (including public good, which is where I recall the few that are considered successes hinge their measurements, i.e. LA). That drives the actual Olympics into those countries arms.
I was tuned into mens figure skating last night in time to see an incredible flawless performance from a young 19 year old man from Japan.
Some time later they were doing snowboarding slope style which was really fun to watch.
There might be less energy with less people in the crowd due to the pandemic, but the performances from the athletes are nonetheless fantastic.
Maybe I'm having a different experience as I'm in Canada and its broadcast differently. The CBC is essentially playing all olympics all the time, of course at various prime times compiling the gold medal finals (especially if a Canadian is in any sorts of contention).
CBC's streaming service Gem will be streaming everything, so with that in mind, if you're a fan of something niche (ie. in a canadian context: not-hockey, not-curling) you have more ability than ever before to watch an entire event.
Yes, far different. Where I use to live, I use to be able to get one of the Montreal Stations. Even though I could not speak French, their coverage was far above what the US would offer. So when I could, I would watch that station. I moved away from there are years ago, and the US coverage is so bad I no longer care about the Olympics.
Look up the Berlin, Moscow and the following LA Olympics as examples of propaganda and politics.
That's all. This realization of the Olympics being a non-event to you is how most adults have viewed the Olympics for the past 50 years. Seriously, no one cares or has ever really cared much. You're just now old enough to realize that. Oh, and there are still families with kids who are watching the Olympics the way you did while growing up. My teenage kids happen to love the Olympics and are watching every event. See? The Olympics haven't changed. You have.
When the US allowed Pro Basketball/Hockey etc. players to be on the Olympics, I stopped caring about it then. Yes other nations supported their athletes, but who cares.
Another thing, especially in the US, all you get to see on TV are the sports the Americans can win at. In the past you could see some sports you never knew existed and some were Americans did not participate in. No more.
Also half the broadcast is about the athlete's life. I just want to see the competition, not a complete biography of the people in it. Seems there is more biography then the actual competition.
Also it seems the Olympics committee wants to drop "unpopular" sports. They tried to drop greco-roman wrestling but reneged due to push back (as far as I know).
In the past, the Olympics was a great vehicle for people who were not selected for professional sports to get a second chance, no more. Seems you need to be a pro to even get to go.
Never mind the over Commercialization.
I could go on, but this is enough for me.
BTW, not watching it at all.
Also, NBC seems to be working for the State Department in trashing China at every turn. Yes, China commits human rights abused, but this is a gold standard case of the pot calling the kettle black. The US is one of the biggest human rights abusers out there. The Olympics is about setting that aside for a moment. The US should have either boycotted the olympics or shut up about the politics.
You're assuming there's some sneaky stuff going on with the State Department pulling the strings, but in this case the simplest explanation seems more likely - NBC recognizes the strong anti-China sentiment around human rights abuses in the viewing public, so they know that catering to that sentiment will be best from a business perspective.
Also, it's extremely naive to think the US government has no influence over US media. First, there is significant overlap and connectivity in the ruling class that runs the government and runs media companies. Second, there are many examples of the media and the government working together to craft a message. I can provide several references to examples if you were unaware of this.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-55794071
Ah.. just set it aside for just a moment..
But yeah, China is the one who needs to be pointed out. How is it not obvious that this is an intentional campaign by the US government to attack China's image? They said nothing about Saudi Arabia or Israel when they marched out during the opening ceremony. And Israel is a rogue nuclear nation and apartheid state with millions in lockdown, which is not even hidden, and finally acknowledged by Amnesty International in the last few days. NBC's comments were to fawn over the first orthodox jewish woman in the Olympics. What's next? To fawn over the first evangelical christian doing whatever? The hypocrisy is frustrating in the extreme.
To me the Olympics used to be about the discovery of heroes, as they emerged through the greatest competition in their event that the planet could put together. Great moments of sportsmanship and overcoming what most people think are limitations of the human body. There was always a sense of discovery and the pioneering of new horizons in the events.
Now it's about making and manufacturing "heroes", with commercial deals going out to athletes years before they're ever even proven to be winners. Selective broadcasts, 30 minute human interest stories, commercials commercials commercials commercials, and after the games branding tie ins. Athletes used to be "Olympic gold medalist!" now they're just celebs with less clout than the many "influencers" who aren't known for having much talent in anything in particular.
edit I just heard the phrase "industrial sports" applied to the problem and couldn't agree more.
It's also a tragedy. Tens of thousands of talented people who dedicate their lives to an event. Then they return from the Olympics to... get a job as a Wallmart greeter? It's a global waste of human potential
The advent of the Internet made it much more widely known that the athletes are being badly exploited and forced to risk getting permanently injured or killed in order to make more money for the corporations that run the Olympics, so it no longer seems ethical to prop it up by paying attention. Especially since several do die each year while training.
Also the fact that they're getting rid of all the real sports in favor of events that have better TV ratings.
And also the fact that many of the events are so badly run that luck plays just as much a factor as talent in determining who wins. The whole thing is just meh.
I am not sure where you are getting your death rate statistics, but based on https://www.olympedia.org/lists/59/manual it does not look like 'several' die each year.
The Olympics have discontinued only a handful number of sports in both the winter and summer segments. I am not sure what you mean by a 'real' sport, but if anything the olympics are adding sports that have gained popularity over time.
And you boiling down the victories for Olympians down to 'luck' reeks of a schmuck that is on their couch being a keyboard warrior. There people train their whole lives, but I doubt you think of that.
> High level training brings many inherent risks that the athletes are presented with
In the sense that most swimmers eventually injure their shoulders, or most rowers eventually injure their lower backs, then sure. But the IOC is purposely making the sports more dangerous to make them more exciting, which is completely different than overuse injuries -- which often don't even have any consequences in every day life, beyond that the person can no longer do their sport at an elite level.
In essence, [modern] Olympics are a glorified parade of genetic freaks (ok, maybe not freaks, but outliers?). I don't mean this disrespectfully to the athletes, but at the same time, the reason they're able to break the top 10 in any particular sport is extreme form of selection bias.
Their lungs are just a little bit bigger than everyone else's. Or their femur/thigh ratio or whatever. Or their fingers are extra flexible.
So what we see is just a ruthless form of selecting the best people genetically, for that sport, since childhood. Yes, sure, they put in a lot of work, but so does every athlete who doesn't make it to the Olympics or WCs. And I'm sure 99+% don't make it. But you still can't overcome something like a height disadvantage in Basketball or Swimming with pure training.
As someone who struggles with poor health genetics, watching Olympics for me is rubbing salt in the wound at best. And once you realize it's just genetic freaks performing "as expected", it's really all very boring. Also once you realize the performance records mostly stagnated after the 1980s, and most of the modern record improvements are due to hyper-optimized equipment.
After all, would we be surprised that a dog is good at running or a fish is good at swimming?
I got the chance to actually meet people from all over the world and learn to converse in their tongues.
No politics, no post-event reviews, no media coverage on flaws of judging, no politicians leveraging Olympics (that I intensively read for in many printed media). A really nice week(s).
Today, not so much.
sources
When I was a kid, seeing Olympic-level athletes (or any high-level athlete) was a Big Deal, even in the news. Now, we’re surrounded by news; we can learn intimate details of their private lives. Familiarity breeds ennui.
The Olympics aren’t for talented amateurs anymore. They probably never were, except in the beginning, now now we realize this. Everyone is aware of the commercialization surrounding every aspect of it. At worst, I t’s a scam on a global basis. At best, it’s just another commercial enterprise slowly being stripped of any national pride.
The Olympics are expensive. The first thought is how much they cost now, not whether we’ll win anything. What is the return on the Olympics? A ton of debt, mainly, and unused venues, slowly rotting, rarely to be re-used.
Going places is expensive. Cheaper than it used to be, for sure, but it still eats a ton of expense that few people have access to. So, we can watch them on video, but it’s easier to just get the highlights than absorb the whole event, since there’s less time availability. But there are other things to be done so we can just plan to get the highlights later.
Finally: it’s sports and I have other amusement available. Sports don’t matter like they used to. I, personally, don’t make connections with people thru discussion of sporting events. So, the Olympics are something that a bunch of people are involved in that has no connection to me.
I've never felt like Olympics were big deal
I'd say that football big events felt bigger than Olympics itself
I was lucky to be in a foreign country during an Olympics (Australia). They had no delusions of grandeur (except maybe in swimming). They interviewed winners regardless of country, they told stories regardless of country. They showed events live.
Dick Ebersol stubbornly kept the standard practice of tape-delaying major events to prime time in the US, long past viability in the Twitter/ESPN/Google ecosystem. In some cases (swimming), they have lobbied to change the schedule so live events can be live in the US prime time window. I believe Michael Phelps's 2008 Beijing races were at 7am local time. Surely other countries loved that.
For me, the precariousness of our time has made me sober up. I'm sick of spectacles. I want real answers and substantive initiatives that work towards solving the problems of our age. Not sports, not bread and circuses, for goodness sakes!
The Olympics have a lot of 1-minute clips that would be perfect for TikTok or a short YouTube video, but even in countries with good Olympics coverage the seem stuck in a TV-like format where you cannot publish anything without permission of whichever company bought the rights in your country.
This is a pity, because the Olympics are objectively great: seeing the end result of years of effort by the greatest athletes in the world is the best motivation anyone can have to achieve more in life.
I liken it to something Jonathan Demme (paraphrasing, maybe misattributing) said about Stop Making Sense - "concert films like to show the audience having fun, but our feeling is it limits/detracts from the experience" (stop making sense shows the audience very very little in its runtime)
So, to me, this carries over in the US coverage - they make all the decisions about how I should feel about every part, rather than letting the viewer come up with their own experience.
But I'd speculate that one of the biggest factors is the feeling of postnationalism.
Being from a specific nation means almost nothing anymore. There's basically almost no such thing as a Frenchman or a Brit or a Canadian: these are just treated as arbitrary designations today. If everybody everywhere is the same and the nation is treated as irrelevant, then an international competition means much less.
[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2022/feb/04/china-opens-wi...
> One of those performing the symbolic act was the Chinese cross-country skier Dinigeer Yilamujiang, who is of Uyghur heritage... That, to put it mildly, was a highly provocative act.
China gave an Uyghur person this high honor. It seems like a positive gesture. How is it provocative? Black people face systemic abuse in the US, are routinely shot by the police and form a persistent underclass but the US had Muhammad Ali light the flame in the '96 Atlanta Games. Was that a provocative act?
> For no amount of odes to peaceful coexistence can hide the fact that these Games will be the most controversial and difficult since Moscow in 1980. Perhaps even Berlin 1936.
More controversial than the Berlin games!? The author doesn't back up this well at all. The author also makes regular Olympics things seem sinister. e.g.
> When Xi was introduced to the crowd of around 25,000 bussed-in spectators before the ceremony began, TV cameras captured him waving and accepting applause for longer than usual, as if he was accepting several encores before the Games had even started.
This happens everywhere but he makes it sound negative.
> The fact that the US, Britain, Canada and others are staging a diplomatic boycott in protest at China’s human rights record is obviously a major factor.
US, Britain and Canada have beef with China and are using the Games politically. Nothing wrong with that but it doesn't make the Games and more or less controversial. US, UK and Can have previously not boycotted Olympics and other sporting events in other authoritarian regimes.
> But the severe Covid restrictions, athletes in quarantine, the lack of real snow, and a shortage of spectators are significant too.
Tokyo also had COVID restrictions. Vancouver and other Winter Games have used snow machines in the past plenty as well. The author mentions later "Earlier, when crowds arrived at the Bird’s Nest stadium they were handed hats and blankets to protect them from the freezing conditions". It does snow in Beijing and it was cold – it is not their fault it didn't snow.
> Within the first 15 minutes, a Chinese flag was also passed through a crowd of people said to represent ethnic groups across the country, while soldiers carrying the flag were then seen marching across the stadium.
The author makes this sound negative and propoganda-y. But in the Vancouver Olympics, the Conservative Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper sat with various First Nation Chiefs, but they're otherwise treated poorly in Canada. US often has soldiers even in non-national sporting events.
All in all, this is appalling and not what I expected from The Guardian!
I feel sorry for Tokyo having been impacted by covid, where they had to postpone. Why we even went to China at all is a mystery to me.
Football is thriving because of fantasy and betting. The NBA has clips, NFTs, and creators producing endless content.
What do the Olympics have? Sure they have human stories, but you need to watch a major network to consume them. The games need to figure out how to fit in today's consumption model.
Remember that propaganda does run both ways, and the constant inflow of anti-Chinese sentiment in this year's presentation starts to get on my nerves. It's become so prominent that I start being willing to pay for a full-event streaming service with no commentators.
Also, we're too used to on-demand TV now, and many people are on-demand only now. There were only a few channels in the past and your options when you sat down to watch TV were limited to what was on. The Olympics had primetime coverage and so that is what people watched.
It can be tricky looking back to younger years and wondering "what changed." Sometimes it's you that changed.
Consider that Nazi Germany hosted an olympics. During the cold war, the olympics was a very lively proxy for soviet-nato competition... with a lot of nationalist propaganda.
Does no one care, or no one in your immediate circle? Did it become more of a propaganda op, or do you just see it more like that today than as a child. I think the olympics are still quite big, generally.
Sometimes it's us that changed.
> Propaganda fest for authoritarian regimes
This hasn't changed though. Rather than a celebration of sport and achievements, the modern Olympic quickly become ultra-chauvinistic, and not just for authoritarian regimes.
I love the athletes, I hate the business.
Partly because we just had the ~real~ summer Olympics a few months ago and you don't normally expect another one that soon.
Maybe it’s time for Olympics to leave the stage.
Personally I got bored on my 5th watch of it.
Nothing new there, except political scandals that nobody really care about. Just competition of pharma.
In America? Every morning in school they make all the kids stand up and recite a pledge of allegiance to the nation
i think we shouldn't support countries with horrible human rights ? its basically legitimizing their genocide,force labour, organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience, threatening to invade Taiwan etc...
this is going to kill the Olympics, no one i know is watching it because of the issues.
The Olympics aren't environmentally sustainable.
Ads
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2022/feb/03/the-elite-and-...
They've always been annoying propaganda for authoritarian regimes, the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany is the prime example of that, and there have always been people oblivious to them.
The final one really takes the cake, simultaneously repeating the right wing propaganda that Black Lives Matter protests were are all riots when less than 5% had any violence, and also implying countries that don’t allow protests about equality are a better place, and specifically a country known to abuse minorities.
1. We have other ways to connect globally thanks to the internet, so we don’t need the Olympics to see a shallow representation of each country. YouTube is a better view into other cultures.
2. We are more aware of the impact and drawbacks of the Olympics, like the costs and associated corruption. It is incredibly irresponsible for any city to volunteer to host it.
3. The politics of the Olympics is not new but it is much more visible and easy to recognize, and that turns viewers off. Things like China having a female Uyghur light the Olympic torch.
4. We have other, better forms of entertainment that use up our limited time.
5. I think collectively there’s a pullback from broadcast sports even as there is a renewed interest in participating in sports personally. It’s not just the politics of it, although that has become a focus even outside the Olympics (NFL NBA etc). It’s that there is an absurdity to caring about what someone achieves when they throw away the rest of their life and just focus on a sport. Someone with that kind of focus in the interest of science is capable of producing lasting impact and move humanity forward. But with mass sports it’s just entertainment and vanity. I think there’s a rising consciousness around this aspect.
It really always was. I mean, people were actually murdered for political reasons at the Olympics in 1972. And much of the visual imagery of the Olympics, including the torch procession, has as much to do with Hitler and Leni Riefenstahl as it does sporting achievement. And then it went through a significant period where it was really a proxy for the Cold War.
The Olympics has always had a whiff of fascism about it (not least because of Juan Antonio Samaranch) and in many ways operates now as a sort of corporatist sledgehammer for major legal change, as does Fifa.
> No one cares. Heck, some people don’t even know that the Olympics are even happening.
There's more on the telly. But we care in Britain; the (Summer) Olympics has become a way for us to demonstrate outsize capability. Less so the Winter Olympics, which has never been a big deal for most of the world; just a few countries with permanent snow.
