Nobody is watching the Olympics.
According to Nielsen, the Rio Olympics opening ceremony dropped 28 percent from London in 2012. That wasn’t an aberration: the kickoff of Olympic competition earned 19.5 million viewers between 8 p.m. and 11 p.m. That’s a 32 percent drop from the London Olympics.
There are several reasons why the Olympics seem less interesting with each successive cycle:
1. Nobody Ever Talks About The Home Country. It would be interesting and worthwhile to critique why exactly there have been so many problems in recent Olympics: dogs being killed in the streets in Sochi, Russia; massive pollution in China and Brazil. It would be interesting to know why the Opening Ceremonies at the Olympics this year looked like a dystopian future filmed in 1970s Technicolor, sort of like the gang meet-up in The Warriors. There’s a reason behind that: these countries are run as massive-government dictatorships. Brazil is a corrupt petro-oligarchy, and it’s run as such. But we never hear about that. All we hear about is that Olympic kayakers are reportedly running into couches in the middle of their races thanks to trash buildup. That makes the Olympics themselves seem trashy, rather than just the home countries.
2. Unity Of Nations Gobbledygook. While the Lebanese national athletes refuse to sit on the same bus as Israeli national athletes, the Olympics keep marketing themselves as a “One World” organization, something along the lines of Disneyland’s “It’s a Small World.” Except that what made the Olympics interesting in years past was the international rivalry. Watch Miracle and imagine that the US hockey team had merely played Finland and skipped right over the Soviet Union. Would there be anything worth filming there? In a Games with no villains, there can be no real heroes.
3. The Media Are Annoying. Instead of just home-teaming it – rooting for the United States – the media feel the need to play neutral at the Olympics. That’s irritating. Nobody cares about the comity of nations. We need a rooting interest. That’s all. And pretending that we ought to simply shrug at dictatorial nations winning medals rather than getting annoyed by it should annoy viewers. More than that, the media nod along with manufactured stories like an American fencer wearing a hijab (yay!) while ignoring legitimate stories like the Israelis feeling real discrimination from Muslim teams at the Olympics. We can’t ever call out the bad guys.
4. We Don’t Care About These Sports. There are only a few sports people care about anymore at the summer Olympics barring a huge star like Michael Phelps: gymnastics, some of the sprints. All the rest are terrible television. Nobody is all that concerned about who wins the women’s rugby Olympic medals. Nobody. There were 19 sports in the 1936 Olympics, for example; there are now 28.
All of this means that nobody is watching. And nobody will continue to watch so long as we’re asked to throw nationalism out the window when watching international competition.
