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15 thoughts on “Raw data: The Olympic Games”

  1. cld

    If they added bungee fencing and air hockey that would be great.

    And everyone loves a pie fight. But horse ballet? People are going to start assassinating those horses.

  2. Thyme Crisis

    When the host city is going to build and pay for everything, with a bow and a ribbon and a red carpet, why not add as much as you can? I'd imagine all this extra content helps with those diamond-encrusted TV deals as well.

  3. Joseph Harbin

    "It's not your imagination: the number of events at the Olympics really does keep going up every year."

    Who's going to be the pedant to say they don't hold Olympics every year?

    (No, no, not me.)

    1. Five Parrots in a Shoe

      Baseball requires a large venue which won't be used by any other sport. Softball has the same problem, which is why it was eliminated from the Olympics after 2008.

      But both baseball and softball will be included in the 2028 Olympics, since those will be held in LA which already has available venues. I would not bet on either sport appearing in Olympics after that.

  5. Five Parrots in a Shoe

    They could reverse this trend, and save a boatload of money, by eliminating all of the fake sports. Synchronized anything. Rhythmic anything. Artistic anything. And all of those sports where the athletes themselves have no clue who is winning until some judges hold up numbers. Eliminate them all, to save money and improve the Olympic product.

  6. jte21

    I think a lot of this is driven by the demands of the broadcasting networks and the need to hold on to/attract new audiences during the games. So you get stuff like Snoop Dogg commenting on gymnastics and new events like breakdancing. Pretty soon there will be no difference between the Olympics and the X Games. It will just be the Exxxtremepics! With everything prefaced with "ultimate" -- frisbee, fencing, diving, etc.

    1. Art Eclectic

      The X Games (originally called the Extreme Games until Disney bought ESPN and Extreme didn't translate well internationally) was originally created to fill a programming gap in the doldrums of summer when baseball was in the mid-season snoozer and nothing else was really happening.

      Ultimately, the whole thing in both cases is about what events will draw enough eyeballs to make it worthwhile to the advertisers. It's less about drawing new audiences and more about drawing the right audiences at the right size to interest the advertisers.

      If you understand that all broadcast television decisions are made around advertiser value, things make much more sense. New sports events are merely a test case to look for additional revenue streams.

  9. kennethalmquist

    An increase over time is what you would expect if the Olympics periodically adds events but never eliminates them. So, does the Olympics ever discontinue an event?

    A bit of searching shows that this does happen, but mainly for events that were recently added. For example, solo synchronized swimming is not, as I would have guessed, the invention of a late night comedian, but an actual sport. It's basically hypothetical synchronized swimming, judged on whether the routine would look like if there were other swimmers doing the same thing. I assume it was dropped because actual synchronized swimming, which can be watched and appreciated by someone not deeply immersed in the sport, drew larger Olympic audiences.

    An exception of sorts occurred in 2012, when five cycling events were eliminated, but five new cycling events were added at the same time, for no net change in the number of events. Also that year, the running target shooting event was replaced by women's skeet.

    Baseball and softball events were held for five consecutive Olympics before being discontinued in 2012, but those events refuse to stay dead. They were added to the 2021 Olympics, dropped in 2024, and will be back in 2028, with their long term future as Olympic sports an open question.

    In summary, events can be dropped after a few Olympics if they don't appear to be working out. Events which have been around longer can be pushed out to make space for new events. To actually decreasing the number of events would require dropping ones that have been around a while, and the only instance I found of that (baseball/softball) may not hold up.

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