Saturday, July 17, 2021

MAGA: Make A (Great Olympic) Games Already!



In my humble opinion, The Summer Olympics are the greatest event in the world. What else even contends?


Who doesn’t have some memory of growing up watching the Summer Olympics? If you aren’t a sports fan, Tom Brady and LeBron James might mean nothing to you beyond their commercials. But you probably watched (or heard about) Usain Bolt and Michael Phelps race to world records. You know McKayla Maroney’s “not impressed” face. 




The World Cup is the only thing that comes close in terms of spectacle and viewership. Outside of sports, there really aren’t any major global events I can think of (EuroVision and US Presidential elections seem like the closest things). And that’s a shame. Global events are great.


What is better than the world coming together, regardless of the occasion? I can’t tell you for sure that these events truly help reduce polarization/xenophobia/outgroup hatred, but it’s hard to see how they wouldn’t have at least a small effect. People talk all the time about representation being important and this feels right up that alley. Beyond that speculation, there is something special about being a part of something (even as a spectator) that you know your family and friends are also tuned into. It’s even better, in an intangible way that is hard for me to put into words, to know it’s not just your fellow countrymenpeople watching, but people all over the world.


As subcultures splinter into ever more subcultures, the chances of creating new events that truly grip a whole nation or the world seem to be narrowing. The days of everyone gathering around the radio/TV at night are over. So we better make the most of what we’ve got in place now! The Olympics have the potential to be so much more. And unless you think national/global events aren’t important or that there are other possible (positive) events that could bring the world together, you should care about this!


Before I go into my spiel, see my previous Olympic coverage here in case you think I’m anything other than an Olympic expert:


Anyways, it’s quite a shame that we are about to have a fan-less Olympics in Tokyo, which easily could have been avoided by a more competent Japanese vaccine rollout or a dramatically nimbler IOC moving the Olympics to the US and/or UK. But alas, national governments and big NGOs tend to be incompetent and slow-moving. 


Here are some random changes I would make if I was the all-powerful ruler of a higher state capacity IOC/World Government:




MOAR SPORTS


We’re currently missing some of the most popular sports in the world, as well as some of the most entertaining. Let’s add:


  • Cricket: This is the second most popular sport in the world. Yes, it’s only seriously played in 15 or so countries, but that’s more than enough and there’s no good reason for its exclusion. Plus I started watching a couple years ago and I’m in charge.



SCENES

  • American Football: Obviously this is mostly played in America but it’s still a somewhat big deal globally (~50 million foreigners watch the Super Bowl). Let’s get weird and split the Americans by state or region and see what happens. This is dumb. I know. But it feels wrong to have THE global sporting event and not include American Football. Another dumb but fun idea is to have people play for the country where their ancestors lived in like 1790. That should give the US a team and cover most of Europe and Western Africa. Maybe with a “one drop rule” we can cover most of the world. (Editor’s Note: Controversial?).


  • Squash: This almost made it in for Tokyo, but missed the cut. We’ve got tennis and table tennis, why not something in between? If racquetball is cooler let’s add that instead.


  • Cyclocross: No brainer



  • Dodgeball: Why not


  • Paintball: This was on ESPN or FSN when I was growing up and I remember it being awesome


  • Lacrosse and Ultimate Frisbee and Frisbee Golf: Not sure if there’s enough of an international presence for either of these but sure why not


  • Inline Speed Skating: This looks just as exciting as speed skating on ice, and has some fun format variations (both in how they are scored and where they take place). A no brainer


  • Obstacle races and/or parkour racing: Could be very fun



My knees hurt watching this. We’ll add some mats and make it cooler.


  • Let’s make up some sports: We’ve put the world’s knowledge in our pockets in the last half-century and we’re still playing the same sports? We aren’t listening to the same music genres or watching the same type of TV shows. We’ll set up a $50 million prize to anyone who comes up with a sport that we add to the Olympics.




Bring in Non-Athletic Events


Why restrict the Olympics to only sports at this point? There are several non-athletic (or semi-athletic) competitions that have hundreds of millions of followers. Bringing in some of these fans could be an all-around win. The no-brainers for me are:


  • Chess



  • Poker




  • E-Sports: Lots to consider here


I think I’d also include:


  • Car Racing ( F1, NASCAR, Rally, etc): Not thrilled about this one but give the people what they want


  • Kabaddi: Only played seriously in a few countries but probably has the highest number of fans per country (most popular in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh). Kinda fun to watch every now and then (it’s basically a mix between tag and wrestling)



Pretty fun


  • Spelling Bee: This might not have many followers, but I don’t think anyone has ever regretted watching the Scripps Spelling Bee and they wouldn’t regret watching this either. We’ll age-cap this of course. And your all seeing government head isn’t letting you abuse your kids into 12 hours of spelling practice a day. Don’t worry.

    • Editor’s Note: The author did not consider the existence of non-English languages. This may complicate things but we’ll work around it

    • Editor’s Note: Why stop at the Spelling Bee? Everyone loves kids. Let’s make the Little League World Series an Olympic event every 4 years.





  • Snooker


  • Darts



FUN


  • Foosball


  • Beer Mile and other (non-binging) drinking games: Some of these might belong in the “athletic events”, but there’s no doubt they all belong in the Olympics 


  • Bowling


I for one am looking forward to the Culture War battles over which of these “non-athletic” events should be gender segregated.






Cut the crap


Sure, I’m adding a non-athletic division to the Olympics. But that is for popular and entertaining stuff. Some “sports” in the Olympics are not popular, not fun, and not sports. Say goodbye to:


  • Artistic Swimming: This is cool if you’re into that kind of thing and I’m sure it’s very hard. But if your sport is decided by judges, it better be both popular and somewhat objective to make the cut.



  • Equestrian: No


  • Weightlifting: This can’t be healthy right? Every time I watch I’m worried something’s gonna pop out or go wrong. 


  • Modern Pentathlon: We’re cutting this but replacing it with some way more AWESOME stuff. Modern Pentathlon has running, swimming, shooting, fencing, and equestrian components. Those last two aren’t gonna fly anymore. But let’s replace this with several other “multi-events”. 

  1. I think you could take almost any combination of Olympic events and use any reasonable scoring system and have some very fun results. The options are endless. 

  2. Even better, let’s change it up every Olympics for at least one of the multis and only give limited notice so that the competing athletes have to rely largely on athleticism and last-second training

  3. Even better better, we’ll throw in some of the non-sport events to find the truly greatest Olympian. Who wouldn’t watch The Fortnite 800m Chess Go-Kart Badminton Boxing Grand Championship presented by Amazon: We Do It All?

  4. Let’s do a King of the Water multi: Swimming, Diving, Canoeing, Sailing, Surfing, Rowing

  5. How about a team multi-event too! Pick your top 15 athletes and get ready for them to play basketball, handball, field hockey, and soccer. Is it going to be good sport? Probably not. Is it going to be fun? Yes.




Cut the fluff


There are several Olympic sports that barely make it past “Cut the Crap”, and yet give out a silly number of medals. If your sport is a niche sport, you should be happy to have any representation at the Olympics (status quo be damned) On the chopping block:


  • Fencing: There are individual and team events for 3 different Fencing disciplines. I’d tell you more about them but I don’t understand them and they aren’t fun to watch. Either combine these into one multi-event or pick one discipline


  • Rowing: I enjoy rowing, but there are 7 different rowing events right now. Too many. Every race is the same length and the only difference is the type of boat and number of people in it. Not the most spectator friendly event anyways (they just slowly move in a straight line and generally you don’t see too many comebacks)




  • Sailing: If Croatia and Israel weren’t good at Sailing you’d be in the cuts section. So be happy I’m letting you keep ONE event (you’re moving to the non-sports division though). Believe it or not, there are currently FIVE sailing events at the Olympics right now (great names though: Laser, 49er, RS:X, 470, Nacra 17). And guess what, they do ELEVEN or THIRTEEN races for each event and they aren’t very fun to watch. Ridiculous. 



Ok this is less boring than I expected. You still don’t need five different disciplines and 12 races each.


  • Shooting: First of all, you’re headed to the non-sports division with Sailing. Second, you are not having NINE (!) different events. Pick the two most entertaining (Trap and Skeet for me).



Do something about Men’s Soccer: 



We can’t cut Men’s Soccer, with it being the most popular sport in the world and all. But we also can’t keep it in its current form, as a U23 tournament that doesn't even feature the best U23 players. This is a tough one. 

  • One possibility is to have the World Cup double as an Olympic event, and hold it during the Olympics in a different time zone (since it deserves its own time slots). I don’t love this. 

  • Maybe we can throw in Futsal and Beach Soccer and drop Men’s Soccer. I don’t love this (though I do love adding those two).




Fun stuff



  • Maybe we can have the Olympics line up with continental tournaments and take the winners (and runner-ups from Europe and South America) of each to the Olympics, where they’d play in an 8 team knockout tournament. This would only add 3 matches to a small number of player’s schedules and might be feasible. As your world government leader, I’m cutting down on the number of games that are played every year anyway, so don’t worry about your favorite players getting burnt out and injured by ridiculous schedules.




Longer Olympics


Three weeks is not even close to enough time to show the 339 events (from 50 disciplines) that are scheduled for the Tokyo Olympics. After we enact my changes, we should have around 60 sports/competitions. In the broadcasting section below, I discuss how we’re televising everything; but for that to work we can’t have 20 sports going on at once. So we’re changing the length to 6 weeks, which allows us to focus on only a few sports a day. And don’t even think about holding a non-Olympics sporting event during those 6 weeks. We’re banning those (sorry MLB and MLS).



MOAR Olympics

Should we have the Olympics every year? Probably not. Every other year? I don't think that's too unreasonable. Maybe if we are going to make them 6 weeks long that might be pushing it. But why not every 3 years? I don't think any fans would be at risk of burning out if we shortened the wait between Games by one year. I don't think athletes would burn out. All I see is a lot of upside.



Hosting


Yes, the Olympics are expensive and governments need money for other stuff (supposedly). One obvious improvement that’s been mentioned many times is to cycle between a handful of hosts who already have the necessary facilities. Beyond that, an event that is watched across the world should have no problem financing itself. I’ll hire some economists to figure it out.



Put an average Jack and Jill in every event


This idea has been thrown around before and it’s so good! It’s hard to appreciate how amazing the athletes are until you see just how much better they are compared to an average person. It would also be extremely entertaining to watch random people try to return a Djokovic serve or do a Canoe Slalom. Let’s put a random person in every event and a team of randos for the team events.




Time Off Work


We in the developed world are slowly moving towards a society that spends less time at work. 4-day weeks and long summer vacations are already a thing in some parts of Europe. Hopefully in the coming decades this can spread across the world. Let’s give workers at least half of the Olympics off. Some people think we’re only decades away from a post-work world. Imagine how big a spectacle the Olympics could be then!




Make the Olympics Must-Watch TV


But if everyone has 3 weeks off, would they choose to watch the Olympics? 


So much of sports’ and culture’s appeal is social. People like watching things they can watch and talk about with their friends and see memes about on Twitter and TikTok, regardless of the quality of the event. College football and basketball play at a much lower level than the G-League and the CFL, but the NCAA gets far more eyeballs because people have chosen to become invested in it and they know their friends and social media following is watching. 


As I mentioned in the intro, we should want to create as many “did you see X?” moments as we can. Right now, there are a handful of Olympic events that reach these heights: arguably Men’s Basketball, the 100m Dash, Swimming, Women’s Beach Volleyball, and Women’s Gymnastics. 


It seems to be limited to these events because that is almost all that is shown in primetime. I’m sure NBC has spent millions of dollars researching what people want to watch, but surely people would be interested in seeing bits of other sports. I don’t doubt the average American doesn’t want to watch hours of Archery, but half an hour of it? If you know your friends are gonna be talking about how impressive the five straight Korean bullseyes were the next day, I bet you give it a chance. Maybe even more of a chance than you’d give to the fifth day in a row of gymnastics. 


My premise here is that people would quickly learn to enjoy the non-premier events in limited quantities, but NBC doesn’t gain much from this so they don’t take the chance of showing them.


But scratch that. Maybe the problem here is that the average American wouldn’t want to watch any Archery (I don’t buy this fully, give it a try NBC!). But I think the average sports fan would. The sports people I follow on Twitter go nuts over random sports all the time. If you love sports, you probably will love any competition your buddies are into. But during the Olympics, there’s just too much going on for the casual fan to venture on their own to the “weirder events”. If true, then the issue is that NBC has to pick one group (casual viewers vs sports fans) over the other. They only have one prime-time slot and they’re gonna fill it with the popular sports that attract the bigger numbers. 


If we lengthen the Games, maybe this is less of an issue. We’ll spend the first hour of prime-time coverage on the Historically Overrepresented Events and the remaining 2-3 hours on some of the Historically Underrepresented Events. If the casual sports fan had to decide between this coverage and the NFL, maybe they go watch football. But if it's the Olympics or no sports for six weeks, they’re probably gonna give the Olympics a shot. And when everyone in the group chat is talking about the Average Joe tipping out of his kayak, they’re gonna be a part of it. 


The end result: 

  • We get more shared national and international moments (because the Olympics are longer and more people will want to tune in to the New and Improved Games) 

  • Smaller events get more of a chance to capture the attention of the general public and sport fans in particular.


Here are some events that I’m pretty confident your average sports fan would enjoy watching a half hour of once every four years (in addition to all the new events I’m adding):


  • Pole Vault: Objectively an absurd event


  • Badminton




Remember how hard it was to get any power or control in gym class?


  • Canoe Slalom: This looks so hard


  • Canoe Sprint: I am in the 99.9th percentile of Olympic watchers and I didn’t even know this was an event until yesterday! How do they not fall over? How do they go in a straight line?




  • Water Polo


  • Karate: New this year, not scheduled to be back in the future :(


  • Mountain Biking




  • Track Cycling


  • Handball



  • Sport Climbing: New this year, sure to be a hit




  • Table Tennis



  • Indoor Volleyball


  • Archery


  • Field Hockey





Make the Olympics Must-Read Stuff


There are over 11,000 athletes from over 200 countries headed to Tokyo. The number of amazing life and sporting stories is surely well into the hundreds. But chances are you’ll only hear a dozen or so of them (mostly from US athletes). It’s hard to think of a better way of getting people excited for random events than learning about some interesting competitors. Since my economists have been busy figuring out how we’re going to bump up revenue, let’s pay some big media and sports outlets to do some major digging (not just in the US!) and get some great stories out there. 


Here are a few random athletes I’ve found on Wikipedia (and in a few articles) that I’m excited to watch:

  • Hend Zaza: Syrian table tenniser who will be the youngest Olympic athlete in over 50 years at age 12. She’s ranked 155th in the world so you better tune into the early rounds to catch a glimpse.

  • Sky Brown: 13 year old British skateboarder who will be the youngest British athlete ever. She fractured her skull last summer so hopefully she doesn’t try anything too crazy. She is one of the medal favorites along with a 15 year old Misugu Okamoto from Japan.

  • Sha'carri Richardson: JK too soon read the room etc

  • Karma: Rumor has it if you don’t cheer for this Bhutanese archer bad things are coming your way.



  • Pravin Jadhav: Indian archer who overcame extreme poverty and malnutrition as a child (he couldn’t even handle the weight of the bow at first) to become a top archer. He’s unlikely to medal in the Individual event, but has a real shot in the Team Archery event.


Pretty crazy story (especially the part where 3:40 is considered a good 800m time):



  • Kimia Alizadeh: Taekwondoer who defected from Iran last year and will be one of the medal contenders at 57kg. She’ll be competing for the Olympic Refugee Team.

  • Saeid Mollaei: Another Iran defector. He moved to Germany after the Iranian confederation ordered him to intentionally lose the semifinal at the 2019 Judo World Championships to avoid facing an Israeli in the final. He’s now competing for Mongolia (whose president is very into Judo and personally offered him citizenship) in the 81kg division and is a medal contender.


Muki (L) and Mollaei (R)


  • Sagi Muki: Sticking with the Mollaei story, Muki was the Israeli judoka Mollaei was told to avoid. They ended up becoming friends after Mollaei fled from Iran and there is now a TV show and documentary in the works on the drama and their later friendship. Maybe they’ll square off in the 81kg division

  • Joe Klecker: I beat Joe several times (proof) in high school (he’s three years younger than me, but that doesn’t feel relevant) and now he’s running in the Men’s 10,000m at the Olympics! Pretty cool story for me (and him! Now he can say he lost in middle school to a 3-time Olympic writer) 

  • Wilfredo Leon: Arguably the greatest (indoor/team) volleyball player on the planet, he fled from Cuba (topical) and now plays for Poland, who are medal contenders

  • Zambia Women’s Soccer Team: Ranked 104th in the world and never qualified for a World Cup or the Olympics. China is the worst team in their group and ranked 14th in the world. A goal would be amazing.

  • Eliud Kipchoge: Ok yeah everyone knows Kipchoge (or should), but in addition to being the GOAT, he might have the best (obscure) soundtrack of any Olympian (see playlist below) (Editor's Note: Karma would like a word). 




Any other ideas? Let’s think big!



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