Wthey are knee-deep in Twixmas: that twilight zone between Christmas and New Year, excesses and reflections, pictures and still more pictures. There have been many greetings over the past week best sports moments of 2014. Across the globe, however, one thing is constant: these catalogs have been dominated by the commemorative Paris Olympics. Nothing else came up.
Seize your day and live in the moment. Keely Hodgkinson, Alex Yee, Simone Biles, Leon Marchand, Mondo Duplantis, Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, and the men’s 1500m final; I was lucky enough to see them all. But even that list barely scratches the surface. As Christophe Dubi, the executive director of the Olympics, recently put it to me, Paris 2024 was like The Dude in The Big Lebowski: a game of games in time and place.
In fact, it was so good that even the youth moments of the year in tennis and basketball – two sports where the Olympics are usually not the pinnacle. Novak Djokovic’s victory over Carlos Alcaraz It was among the great men’s connections, while Steph Curry provided the golden dagger one of the great moments, and memes, in the dying embers. Team USA triumphed against France.
The TV figures were also strong, with BBC live coverage winning the ratings battle every day. So, at this time of redundancy and thought-provoking, a question arises. Or is it true that the summer sports are bad for the players, and most of the time they are amazing sports celebrities? Maybe even two years?
Before, you could dismiss the sentence with two words: too expensive. But Paris – while not exactly cheap – shows that stage games can be made without a city or disabled from the air. It provided the perfect backdrop to Ionic tourist attractions. And only two new venues, the Olympic village and the tax center, were built from scratch. It’s not like there’s a lack of power or hosts. India and Hungary openly want to be Olympians. Qatar and Saudi Arabia would be released as well. And so it would be in London, if it had a real chance to take the stage again.
Naturally, there are opposing arguments, with the main being that Olympia would lose the rarity value that makes it so unique. And, as Michael Payne, former senior in the executive thesis International Olympic Committeeexplains, you can have too much of a good thing.
“When Fifa was looking at playing the World Cup for two years, they came out with various research studies saying that the fans want it,” he said. “But if you asked six-year-olds if they wanted Christmas every day, what would they say? And how quickly do you want to lose what makes it special?
Payne believes Paris was arguably the biggest Olympics yet and provided a much-needed boost to the Olympic brand after Tokyo and Rio. But he warns that you can’t expect planning to hit the streets of Paris – or London in 2012 – every time.
He also wonders whether having enough sponsorship and TV money to sustain the game for two years. “Olympus is a robust health product,” he insists. “But at the same time, the business model that has supported the Olympics for 40 years is undergoing significant change.”
Not only is doubt growing in the long-term viability of the Olympic partnering authority model, which brings hundreds of thousands of pounds to the IOC every cycle, but many major TV contracts are set to expire in 2032. You think there’s anybody on the planet who can tell you what the landscape will look like in 2036,” Paganus says. “Would it be the traditional players? Or will there be players? Is there even a people we haven’t heard of today?
That is true. But the final argument is more frequent for Olympia. If the games don’t hit, they can fall back. We live in an age where the average sports fan in the UK is increasingly big-event. Every cough and sneeze of football season. But in the average year, the main focus is on the big things.
For tennis and golf this means grand slams and majors. For rugby it is the Six Nations and the World Cup. Cricket? Probably the Test series against Australia and India, the World Cup and not much else. And for Olympic sports and classical athletes? Let’s be honest. Outside of maybe track and field, how many will enter the public consciousness even before Los Angeles in 2018? There is a danger that in a world of shortening attention spans, it can lead out of sight forever out of mind.
There are certainly logistical challenges in hosting the Olympics every two or maybe three years. But they are not insurmountable. To avoid the soccer World Cup, for example, the Olympics could become ridiculous in odd years.
One final point. We often hear from the IOC that athletes are at the heart of the Olympics. But how is it possible that many of the greatest athletes of this or any age – from Biles to Duplantis to McLaughlin-Levrone – will have to wait four years to have the world’s attention fully focused on them again?
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