It feels like we've been tip-toeing in the direction of multi-host Olympics.
For the Paris Olympics, the surfing was on the other side of the world in Tahiti (French Polynesia).
The LA Olympics bid decided they didn't want to build any new facilities, and most events will be at existing facilities around LA, but softball and canoeing events will be in Oklahoma due to better facilities that exist there: https://la28.org/en/games-plan/venues.html
Doesn't seem like much more of a stretch to have a USA-hosted Olympics with events around the country.
The big downside of course being less interaction between athletes from various sports, but I think at this point, where you've got over 10,000 athletes, you could still probably split that into several cities and have big, joyous celebrations in each.
Every Olympic sport has an annual championship in different cities at different times in Olympic off years. Having everyone together in one place at one time is what makes the Olympics special. Special for the athletes, live spectators & host city alike. The more the Olympics are spread out physically, the less special it is for the most people.
On the other hand, I know this is a little naive since most of the money revolves around TV rights. Also, as a TV spectator, 24 hour live coverage (like the Watanabe is suggesting in the article) of the Olympics sounds pretty cool. I wonder if the TV networks would like this. It probably solves a lot of the logistical issues host cities have been having as well. This also avoids the worst outcome of coming to a point where only a few host cities, like LA and Paris, can reasonably meet all the IOC's demands games after games.
> Having everyone together in one place at one time is what makes the Olympics special. Special for the athletes, live spectators & host city alike.
A good idea in theory, but in practice the cost of hosting the entire Olympics in a single city has become so cost-prohibitive infrastructure-wise that very few are even willing to do it anymore. We already see that with the winning LA bid for the next summer Olympics, where they're not building anything new to host it.
>It feels like we've been tip-toeing in the direction of multi-host Olympics.
I wish they would just pick one place to hold their shenanigans and stay there.
Yes, I hated the bullshit that occured behind the scenes in 2020 Tokyo and hope one of the most cancerous and corrupt organizations ever never shits up Japan again.
My sympathies to any athletes who sincerely just want to play and compete, but the event itself is trash.
The 2026 FIFA World Cup will be held in Canada, USA and Mexico. I do think spreading things out makes a lot of sense. Slightly less incentive for corruption, too.
The Olympics are choking themselves to death right now. I can recall sitting on the sidewalk watching the torch relay for Los Angeles 1984, but today the Olympics is just eighteen months of irritating ads followed by three weeks of media clucking.
Fewer and fewer cities want to splash hundreds of millions on building stadiums that go to rust in a few years, and the ones still willing to do so are often just using it as a sports-washing vehicle for mediocre records on other factors. It's not a good look when voters overwhelmingly cheer the withdrawl of your city's bid!
Once you find a venue, you're not really playing for the host city, you're playing for the cameras. Schedule the events based on when it's prime time in rich ad markets, not when it makes most sense for the sports, or even when it would maximize the exposure for the sports that most people ONLY see once every four years. Ooh, look, the Dream Team. Big whoop. They run 40 NBA games a year on local TV, show me judo or hammer-throwing or synchronized swimming. And despite all that, they seem to have no concern about the TV product they made such efforts to prostate themselves for. Does anyone at NBC get concerned that people intentionally look for VPNs to access the CBC and BBC streams because they've made such a mess of tape delays, schmaltzy human-interest stories, and laser-focusing on American athletes?
Of course, the sphere around the events is a complete branded marketing festival. The thing that still sticks with me was an article about the London 2012 games that said they had people going around putting tape over the logos on the toilets because they weren't an official paying sponsor. That level of petty goes well beyond business school. They're over-the-top with their trademarks too, especially for a nominally well-intentioned non-profit. Nobody is going to starve if the gyro place on the corner is a little too loose with adjectives referring to a specific holy mountain.
The Olympics used to be a noble idea: we can have international competition in a benign venue, in the spirit of celebrating peaceful achievement. Maybe a much smaller take on it would go back to those roots. Smaller events wouldn't disrupt or bankrupt host cities, so we'd see real interest in hosting again, and they'd be less tempting to turn into a TV Event and marketing freakshow at the expense of all else.
Maybe his idea of "let's do five cities at once" is a way to get there, although I worry it's more the business equivalent of "we couldn't scale single-threaded CPUs past 4-5GHz, so the only way to go bigger was to add more cores."
It's the same with football. FIFA is so ridiculously corrupt it's actually jarring. Hosting World Cups in Qatar and now Saudi Arabia, running players into the ground by continuously adding more fixtures to the season, awash with gambling money, football clubs owned by nation states.
I stopped watching football when the World Cup went to Qatar and I haven't watched any since, it turns my stomach now.
And it’s coming to Seattle in 2026. I would be more excited about it, except for the reasons you listed (and more). Thankfully we will both be retired by then and can just leave for a month. At least World Cup acts as the kick in the ass to finish that light rail to Redmond.
For US bidders, I've heard people say that it's good to have a bunch of colleges nearby, because they can be built-in Reuters. You can see this in the list of Atlanta venues, and I've heard it pointed out in potential bids by Boston and Philadelphia. I'm not sure if this holds elsewhere since the connection between sports and education is stronger in the US than other places.
And it's not obvious from the venue list for Atlanta, but Centennial Olympic Stadium is now on its second round of reuse - it was reconfigured for the Atlanta Braves baseball team after the Olympics, and now Georgia State uses it for football after the Braves moved out to the suburbs.
When they had the Olympics in London I heard tourism actually decreased because everyone was afraid of the crowds. [1]
I'm thinking about going to the next Olympics in LA because I want to go back to LA and because LA has always been sane about it: the 1984 Olympics made money because they didn't build an Olympic village -- and they could talk terms to the IOC because no city wanted to host it after Munich.
[1] I remember standing in front of the New Yorker hotel across from Madison Square Garden and some Londoners were complaining that NYC wasn't crowded enough. Crowds in London are intimidating under normal conditions.
FWIW, flights and hotels were unreasonably expensive, even for London. I was sort of relieved after I went through the ticket lottery and didn't get anything I had wanted. It was disheartening to later watch and see a bunch of empty seats on TV though! https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2012/jul/29/london-2012-em...
> The Olympics are choking themselves to death right now. I can recall sitting on the sidewalk watching the torch relay for Los Angeles 1984, but today the Olympics is just eighteen months of irritating ads followed by three weeks of media clucking.
Avoiding NBC's Primetime coverage has been huge to my enjoyment of the Olympics in recent games. Having the streaming apps to watch the events I want, in full, often without commercial breaks is an absolute game changer. Also, you avoid all the 15 minute long fluff pieces about the guy who grew up in small town nowhere and now is the 92nd best javelin thrower in the world hyping him up as the closest thing to a living god as is imaginable.
The streaming app for the Paris Olympics was a revolution from which I can never go back to OTA coverage. I watched so many more competitions and in sports that are never broadcast in the US because they are too niche or are not popular enough in the US for people to know about. Gee, maybe they are not popular because nobody has ever seen a match!
I got super into handball during Rio 2016. It was on, maybe CNBC? Definitely didn't get any play on any of the "main" channels. Now it's my guilty pleasure every 4 years.
> Once you find a venue, you're not really playing for the host city, you're playing for the cameras. Schedule the events based on when it's prime time in rich ad markets, not when it makes most sense for the sports, or even when it would maximize the exposure for the sports that most people ONLY see once every four years. Ooh, look, the Dream Team. Big whoop. They run 40 NBA games a year on local TV, show me judo or hammer-throwing or synchronized swimming. And despite all that, they seem to have no concern about the TV product they made such efforts to prostate themselves for. Does anyone at NBC get concerned that people intentionally look for VPNs to access the CBC and BBC streams because they've made such a mess of tape delays, schmaltzy human-interest stories, and laser-focusing on American athletes?
About this: streaming has been a thing for more than a decade now. Why can't anyone decide to pay some sum to have access to every camera stream available during an event. Maybe even have some special prices to access drone cameras. Then anyone can tailor their own Olympics experience (4k screen: let's show 4 camera angle of this match at the same time) or decide to follow some editor's choice.
And you could generalize it to most sports. Imagine a twitch of sports event where people pay for access to those feeds, or combination of feeds or the feeds + commentary some streamer also pays for. Add infinite replay.
Ironically, the best thing might be for us to pay a little less attention to the Olympics. As long as it is a highly profitable endeavor, most likely nothing will fundamentally change.
Yep. And I think it's not only olympics, but the whole sportentainment industry.
I used to watch quite a bit of sports. Olympics set, F1, basketball, football, cycling... Now I don't give a damn neither about plays nor results. The only excerpt from Paris olympics I saw was some politicised BS from opening or closing ceremony.
The whole thing seems to be about money and advertising. Sports themselves seem to be getting re-made for looks-nice-on-TV and people who just want some noise in background and ain't actually interested in a given sports mechanics. I'll better watch some podcast on youtube explaining nooks and crannies of some sport than broadcast of an event.
It’s crazy how easily platforms like LiveTV can transform the way we experience sports. For a while, I was paying for subscriptions that didn’t even guarantee a smooth stream, which is why LiveTV stands out to me. I can tune into major events like the Champions League or NBA games without worrying about fees or regional restrictions. The quality is pretty reliable for a free service, and I can find streams for pretty much any sport, from football to tennis. The ads are a small price to pay for such broad access. I also love the option to watch replays, so if I miss a match, I can catch up later. Just make sure your internet connection is stable, especially if you're planning to stream for long periods. For anyone who wants solid sports coverage, https://livetv691.me/ is definitely worth checking out.
A dozen hours of live sport every weekend over winter, no adverts, decent commentary. (You might recognise the main commentator from motor-racing coverage)
Since the same pictures feed is used on the German TV coverage, you often get a minute to take a timeout and look at some beautiful Alpine scenes in the middle too while they play adverts on TV.
It used to be on Eurosport UK too, but at some point they cut it loose, I guess there just wasn't the audience for it.
I feel like American college sports are in a similar cycle of enshittification right now.
Conference-specific TV networks have become an enormous source of income, so conferences are incentivized to expand distribution of their regional TV networks by moving into new geographic markets. Schools, looking out for themselves, are trying to join the most successful conference possible, to get a cut of the mega-conference TV cash. We now have the so-called Atlantic Coast Conference with members schools in Texas and California. The Big 10 Conference, previously made up of 10 midwestern schools, is now up to 18 schools, spanning from coast to coast.
Athletes in non-revenue sports are taking long plane rides so they can go run on a track or swim in a pool thousands of miles from home, rather than at a nearby, longstanding rival's facility.
The revenue sports are generally happier, although you do get oddities there too. In football, teams generally only play 8 conference teams, so determining the best team in an 18-team conference where each team hasn't even played half of the league isn't terribly fair.
Any why are universities abandoning historic rivalries and doing so much wasteful travel? All for that almighty dollar.
Lately I discovered that going to basketball games at my Uni is a great time and a great deal (I can buy $6 tickets for my whole party as a staff member, it is $8 for everyone else) I can sit in the front if I want, it's more fun with the band and the cheer squad and the dance team doing entertainment. The facility is great and has accommodation for families with children, who cheer as hard as anybody and add to the atmosphere. It's just great. [1]
Almost all the games they play (Ivy League in the second half of the season) are with teams that are a reasonable bus ride away.
In comparison I'm indifferent to watching NBA or college ball on TV.
[1] I sometimes go to do photography, other times I bring friends and family. I am going to shoot a double header at the school on the other hill next Friday which is unticketed and a smaller facility, I gotta get a spare memory card because I filled my card just the moment the final buzzer rang in the last game.
This is what I think is lost in modern sports, and I don't understand why people find them enervating - going to a local baseball game run by the minor leagues is fun and entertaining and engaging, I would rather have a reasonably bad sunburn than sit through an MLB game.
I had an NHL season ticket plan that included AHL games (the teams played in the same building at the time). Major league, minor league, it doesn't matter. What sets live sports apart from watching on TV is the crowd. Nothing beats the atmosphere of a full barn all cheering in unison for the home team, living and dying with each play.
Yep, I paid $33 to to see the New York Red Bulls play (Major League Soccer) and it was just that. It's not the insanity of a Premier League game but it's the closest thing to a European soccer game that you'll see in the states, they even have a seating section to concentrate the die-hard fans right by the opponent's goal. Watching on TV is not the same.
At least in the west, the PAC-12 imploded because it wasn’t a source of income because they bet on their conference specific networks instead of working with the major TV networks. Schools knew they were leaving money on the table and PAC-12 couldn’t do for them what the other conferences could.
The Big 10 hasn’t had 10 schools since 1990, only 3 years after they officially adopted the name.
>in the spirit of celebrating peaceful achievement. Maybe a much smaller take on it would go back to those roots.
It is blasphemous that countries actively waging war or passively engaging in proxy wars or other conflicts (eg: trade wars) get to play in the Olympics.
The first requirement to participating should be that the country is at peace with others, in the literal sense. Yes, this is going to evict like 90% of the world including countries like the US, but this is a philosophical hill worth dying on.
The rhetoric should be "You wanna play? Then declare peace with your enemies.", not "You wanna play? Let's see what bullshit we can craft so you can play without making peace." leading to nonsense like Americans and Russians playing despite literally waging war, and so on.
> They're over-the-top with their trademarks too, especially for a nominally well-intentioned non-profit.
Agreed, it's amazing people put up with this part of them. The NFL is similar with Super Bowl trademarks (petty to the point where they tried to trademark "The Big Game" when people started using it), but they don't pretend to be about bringing the world together in peace and unity.
One city: Athens. After the first year it suddenly becomes a lot less expensive to maintain the infrastructure. Especially if all participating nations are asked a sum depending on their GDP.
And all participants naked before the gods as it was done originally.
In spirit, it's a neat idea. In practice, it would mean that for much of Asia and the entirety of the Americas the events are never aired at an ideal time. Shifting the geography allows for the prime viewing experience to shift with it. That's part of what I love about Watanabe's idea: everyone always gets a prime viewing experience of at least some of the sports.
The broadcast signals could in principle be recorded onto some manner of magnetic tape, then read back off that tape and rebroadcast a few hours later at whichever time is ideal for different parts of the world.
I know you're being a little cheeky, but if you think "tape delay" is some sort of solution to the problem I voiced then you're not really being serious. While NBC certainly improved their primetime experience this time around, it's not at all the same as actually watching the events live. This is doubly true since the results of many of those contests are widely publicized before their primetime airing.
Is Greece really that bad of a compromise timezone? It's GMT+2, compared to GMT+8 for Beijing and GMT-5 for NYC/DC. It's pretty much just West Coast US and Australia who get really screwed, which is probably as good as you're going to get for a global event.
The whole of the Americas gets screwed at GMT+2. My point is there is no good compromise timezone at all, that's why I think hosting it in one city is a very bad one. The status quo is better than that.
But the status quo sucks too. I love the idea of having multiple cities hosting around the world at the same time.
Eh, not really -- Peru is also GMT-5, and Brazil is only GMT-3.
The Paris Olympics ran 9am-midnight, which puts it at 2am-5pm going from Athens to GMT-5. Sure, you've got a few hours in the morning which are too early, but that's still a lot of Olympics happening during daylight hours for most of the Americas.
"Happening during daylight hours" is fine, but if that's all it ever is for you then it diminishes the relevance over time because to most the events will be watching something that you already know the outcome of. Modern society is not built for the success of tape-delay sporting events.
I'm not saying it's not watchable, I am saying that makes it a wholly different event for everyone in the Americas. It's basically the UEFA Euro: good enough for enthusiasts, accessible enough to check-in on for most, not situated to garner large-scale attention (and thus, in the longer-term, interest).
Reusing stadiums every 3-4 olympics wouldn't be super helpful. That is 12-16 years between hosting again. You'd realistically only get 2 games out of your locations before you'd be rebuilding it. Which admittedly is 2x as many times as you get out of most games, but its not a particularly big drop in the bucket in the grand scheme.
This gets suggested over and over again. Sometimes people say it should be in one city. The romantics suggest Athens (because the Greeks invented the thing) but the practical suggestion is Los Angeles.
I really don't hate that at all. 24 hours of live sports sounds fantastic, especially when the games are being held on the other side of the world so you either watch 12 hours delayed or are up at 2am to catch it live. You'd still have some events that you'd have to watch at odd hours, but you'd have the option of watching something else live.
Also lessening the burden of host cities to build up infrastructure to host the world for a month only to be left with unused/underused facilities left to rot is a win.
To be fair the FIFA world cup has usually been split among many cities. Putting it in different countries changes almost nothing.
Brazil hosted it all over their country so it completely irrelevant if those cities were in brazil or an adjoining country due to the size of brazil and how hard it is to travel to some of their FIFA sites.
Not sure the comparison exactly tracks, because the teams need to be traveling.
Unless I misunderstood something, unless you'd be competing in two wildly different disciplines you'd be in one place. Unless they separate like 100m and 800m running :P
The problem is the coverage. I stopped watching a long time ago. The hosts are terrible. The social backstories are insufferable. It's impossible to watch your favorite <insert sport>... I'd tune in to a live streamed event, but I'm sure they'd screw it up somehow.
It feels like we've been tip-toeing in the direction of multi-host Olympics.
For the Paris Olympics, the surfing was on the other side of the world in Tahiti (French Polynesia).
The LA Olympics bid decided they didn't want to build any new facilities, and most events will be at existing facilities around LA, but softball and canoeing events will be in Oklahoma due to better facilities that exist there: https://la28.org/en/games-plan/venues.html
Doesn't seem like much more of a stretch to have a USA-hosted Olympics with events around the country.
The big downside of course being less interaction between athletes from various sports, but I think at this point, where you've got over 10,000 athletes, you could still probably split that into several cities and have big, joyous celebrations in each.
Every Olympic sport has an annual championship in different cities at different times in Olympic off years. Having everyone together in one place at one time is what makes the Olympics special. Special for the athletes, live spectators & host city alike. The more the Olympics are spread out physically, the less special it is for the most people.
On the other hand, I know this is a little naive since most of the money revolves around TV rights. Also, as a TV spectator, 24 hour live coverage (like the Watanabe is suggesting in the article) of the Olympics sounds pretty cool. I wonder if the TV networks would like this. It probably solves a lot of the logistical issues host cities have been having as well. This also avoids the worst outcome of coming to a point where only a few host cities, like LA and Paris, can reasonably meet all the IOC's demands games after games.
> Having everyone together in one place at one time is what makes the Olympics special. Special for the athletes, live spectators & host city alike.
A good idea in theory, but in practice the cost of hosting the entire Olympics in a single city has become so cost-prohibitive infrastructure-wise that very few are even willing to do it anymore. We already see that with the winning LA bid for the next summer Olympics, where they're not building anything new to host it.
>It feels like we've been tip-toeing in the direction of multi-host Olympics.
I wish they would just pick one place to hold their shenanigans and stay there.
Yes, I hated the bullshit that occured behind the scenes in 2020 Tokyo and hope one of the most cancerous and corrupt organizations ever never shits up Japan again.
My sympathies to any athletes who sincerely just want to play and compete, but the event itself is trash.
The 2026 FIFA World Cup will be held in Canada, USA and Mexico. I do think spreading things out makes a lot of sense. Slightly less incentive for corruption, too.
The Olympics are choking themselves to death right now. I can recall sitting on the sidewalk watching the torch relay for Los Angeles 1984, but today the Olympics is just eighteen months of irritating ads followed by three weeks of media clucking.
Fewer and fewer cities want to splash hundreds of millions on building stadiums that go to rust in a few years, and the ones still willing to do so are often just using it as a sports-washing vehicle for mediocre records on other factors. It's not a good look when voters overwhelmingly cheer the withdrawl of your city's bid!
Once you find a venue, you're not really playing for the host city, you're playing for the cameras. Schedule the events based on when it's prime time in rich ad markets, not when it makes most sense for the sports, or even when it would maximize the exposure for the sports that most people ONLY see once every four years. Ooh, look, the Dream Team. Big whoop. They run 40 NBA games a year on local TV, show me judo or hammer-throwing or synchronized swimming. And despite all that, they seem to have no concern about the TV product they made such efforts to prostate themselves for. Does anyone at NBC get concerned that people intentionally look for VPNs to access the CBC and BBC streams because they've made such a mess of tape delays, schmaltzy human-interest stories, and laser-focusing on American athletes?
Of course, the sphere around the events is a complete branded marketing festival. The thing that still sticks with me was an article about the London 2012 games that said they had people going around putting tape over the logos on the toilets because they weren't an official paying sponsor. That level of petty goes well beyond business school. They're over-the-top with their trademarks too, especially for a nominally well-intentioned non-profit. Nobody is going to starve if the gyro place on the corner is a little too loose with adjectives referring to a specific holy mountain.
The Olympics used to be a noble idea: we can have international competition in a benign venue, in the spirit of celebrating peaceful achievement. Maybe a much smaller take on it would go back to those roots. Smaller events wouldn't disrupt or bankrupt host cities, so we'd see real interest in hosting again, and they'd be less tempting to turn into a TV Event and marketing freakshow at the expense of all else.
Maybe his idea of "let's do five cities at once" is a way to get there, although I worry it's more the business equivalent of "we couldn't scale single-threaded CPUs past 4-5GHz, so the only way to go bigger was to add more cores."
It's the same with football. FIFA is so ridiculously corrupt it's actually jarring. Hosting World Cups in Qatar and now Saudi Arabia, running players into the ground by continuously adding more fixtures to the season, awash with gambling money, football clubs owned by nation states.
I stopped watching football when the World Cup went to Qatar and I haven't watched any since, it turns my stomach now.
And it’s coming to Seattle in 2026. I would be more excited about it, except for the reasons you listed (and more). Thankfully we will both be retired by then and can just leave for a month. At least World Cup acts as the kick in the ass to finish that light rail to Redmond.
> At least World Cup acts as the kick in the ass to finish that light rail to Redmond.
>> Fewer and fewer cities want to splash hundreds of millions on building stadiums that go to rust in a few years
To me, this is the most important reform the IOC needs -- ensuring that any infrastructure built for a games has an ironclad post-games plan.
If that requires multiple cities, then multiple cities it is.
Atlanta 1996 is a solid example of it done right. Don't budget, spread facilities around, and have a reuse plan. Most of the infrastructure is still in use today. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_Summer_Olympics#Venues_...
Typically, this goes off the rails when governments bid for games (Sochi, Beijing) and then drastically (10x norms!) the budget for minimal gains.
For US bidders, I've heard people say that it's good to have a bunch of colleges nearby, because they can be built-in Reuters. You can see this in the list of Atlanta venues, and I've heard it pointed out in potential bids by Boston and Philadelphia. I'm not sure if this holds elsewhere since the connection between sports and education is stronger in the US than other places.
And it's not obvious from the venue list for Atlanta, but Centennial Olympic Stadium is now on its second round of reuse - it was reconfigured for the Atlanta Braves baseball team after the Olympics, and now Georgia State uses it for football after the Braves moved out to the suburbs.
When they had the Olympics in London I heard tourism actually decreased because everyone was afraid of the crowds. [1]
I'm thinking about going to the next Olympics in LA because I want to go back to LA and because LA has always been sane about it: the 1984 Olympics made money because they didn't build an Olympic village -- and they could talk terms to the IOC because no city wanted to host it after Munich.
[1] I remember standing in front of the New Yorker hotel across from Madison Square Garden and some Londoners were complaining that NYC wasn't crowded enough. Crowds in London are intimidating under normal conditions.
FWIW, flights and hotels were unreasonably expensive, even for London. I was sort of relieved after I went through the ticket lottery and didn't get anything I had wanted. It was disheartening to later watch and see a bunch of empty seats on TV though! https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2012/jul/29/london-2012-em...
> The Olympics are choking themselves to death right now. I can recall sitting on the sidewalk watching the torch relay for Los Angeles 1984, but today the Olympics is just eighteen months of irritating ads followed by three weeks of media clucking.
Avoiding NBC's Primetime coverage has been huge to my enjoyment of the Olympics in recent games. Having the streaming apps to watch the events I want, in full, often without commercial breaks is an absolute game changer. Also, you avoid all the 15 minute long fluff pieces about the guy who grew up in small town nowhere and now is the 92nd best javelin thrower in the world hyping him up as the closest thing to a living god as is imaginable.
The streaming app for the Paris Olympics was a revolution from which I can never go back to OTA coverage. I watched so many more competitions and in sports that are never broadcast in the US because they are too niche or are not popular enough in the US for people to know about. Gee, maybe they are not popular because nobody has ever seen a match!
I got super into handball during Rio 2016. It was on, maybe CNBC? Definitely didn't get any play on any of the "main" channels. Now it's my guilty pleasure every 4 years.
> Once you find a venue, you're not really playing for the host city, you're playing for the cameras. Schedule the events based on when it's prime time in rich ad markets, not when it makes most sense for the sports, or even when it would maximize the exposure for the sports that most people ONLY see once every four years. Ooh, look, the Dream Team. Big whoop. They run 40 NBA games a year on local TV, show me judo or hammer-throwing or synchronized swimming. And despite all that, they seem to have no concern about the TV product they made such efforts to prostate themselves for. Does anyone at NBC get concerned that people intentionally look for VPNs to access the CBC and BBC streams because they've made such a mess of tape delays, schmaltzy human-interest stories, and laser-focusing on American athletes?
About this: streaming has been a thing for more than a decade now. Why can't anyone decide to pay some sum to have access to every camera stream available during an event. Maybe even have some special prices to access drone cameras. Then anyone can tailor their own Olympics experience (4k screen: let's show 4 camera angle of this match at the same time) or decide to follow some editor's choice.
And you could generalize it to most sports. Imagine a twitch of sports event where people pay for access to those feeds, or combination of feeds or the feeds + commentary some streamer also pays for. Add infinite replay.
Ironically, the best thing might be for us to pay a little less attention to the Olympics. As long as it is a highly profitable endeavor, most likely nothing will fundamentally change.
Yep. And I think it's not only olympics, but the whole sportentainment industry.
I used to watch quite a bit of sports. Olympics set, F1, basketball, football, cycling... Now I don't give a damn neither about plays nor results. The only excerpt from Paris olympics I saw was some politicised BS from opening or closing ceremony.
The whole thing seems to be about money and advertising. Sports themselves seem to be getting re-made for looks-nice-on-TV and people who just want some noise in background and ain't actually interested in a given sports mechanics. I'll better watch some podcast on youtube explaining nooks and crannies of some sport than broadcast of an event.
It’s crazy how easily platforms like LiveTV can transform the way we experience sports. For a while, I was paying for subscriptions that didn’t even guarantee a smooth stream, which is why LiveTV stands out to me. I can tune into major events like the Champions League or NBA games without worrying about fees or regional restrictions. The quality is pretty reliable for a free service, and I can find streams for pretty much any sport, from football to tennis. The ads are a small price to pay for such broad access. I also love the option to watch replays, so if I miss a match, I can catch up later. Just make sure your internet connection is stable, especially if you're planning to stream for long periods. For anyone who wants solid sports coverage, https://livetv691.me/ is definitely worth checking out.
If you want to watch some real sport on YT, check out bobsled and skeleton.
The IBSF tv team broadcast it themselves for free on youtube. ( e.g. https://youtu.be/Y2BXBTmSZGo?t=2195 )
A dozen hours of live sport every weekend over winter, no adverts, decent commentary. (You might recognise the main commentator from motor-racing coverage)
Since the same pictures feed is used on the German TV coverage, you often get a minute to take a timeout and look at some beautiful Alpine scenes in the middle too while they play adverts on TV.
It used to be on Eurosport UK too, but at some point they cut it loose, I guess there just wasn't the audience for it.
I feel like American college sports are in a similar cycle of enshittification right now.
Conference-specific TV networks have become an enormous source of income, so conferences are incentivized to expand distribution of their regional TV networks by moving into new geographic markets. Schools, looking out for themselves, are trying to join the most successful conference possible, to get a cut of the mega-conference TV cash. We now have the so-called Atlantic Coast Conference with members schools in Texas and California. The Big 10 Conference, previously made up of 10 midwestern schools, is now up to 18 schools, spanning from coast to coast.
Athletes in non-revenue sports are taking long plane rides so they can go run on a track or swim in a pool thousands of miles from home, rather than at a nearby, longstanding rival's facility.
The revenue sports are generally happier, although you do get oddities there too. In football, teams generally only play 8 conference teams, so determining the best team in an 18-team conference where each team hasn't even played half of the league isn't terribly fair.
Any why are universities abandoning historic rivalries and doing so much wasteful travel? All for that almighty dollar.
Lately I discovered that going to basketball games at my Uni is a great time and a great deal (I can buy $6 tickets for my whole party as a staff member, it is $8 for everyone else) I can sit in the front if I want, it's more fun with the band and the cheer squad and the dance team doing entertainment. The facility is great and has accommodation for families with children, who cheer as hard as anybody and add to the atmosphere. It's just great. [1]
Almost all the games they play (Ivy League in the second half of the season) are with teams that are a reasonable bus ride away.
In comparison I'm indifferent to watching NBA or college ball on TV.
[1] I sometimes go to do photography, other times I bring friends and family. I am going to shoot a double header at the school on the other hill next Friday which is unticketed and a smaller facility, I gotta get a spare memory card because I filled my card just the moment the final buzzer rang in the last game.
This is what I think is lost in modern sports, and I don't understand why people find them enervating - going to a local baseball game run by the minor leagues is fun and entertaining and engaging, I would rather have a reasonably bad sunburn than sit through an MLB game.
I had an NHL season ticket plan that included AHL games (the teams played in the same building at the time). Major league, minor league, it doesn't matter. What sets live sports apart from watching on TV is the crowd. Nothing beats the atmosphere of a full barn all cheering in unison for the home team, living and dying with each play.
Yep, I paid $33 to to see the New York Red Bulls play (Major League Soccer) and it was just that. It's not the insanity of a Premier League game but it's the closest thing to a European soccer game that you'll see in the states, they even have a seating section to concentrate the die-hard fans right by the opponent's goal. Watching on TV is not the same.
At least in the west, the PAC-12 imploded because it wasn’t a source of income because they bet on their conference specific networks instead of working with the major TV networks. Schools knew they were leaving money on the table and PAC-12 couldn’t do for them what the other conferences could.
The Big 10 hasn’t had 10 schools since 1990, only 3 years after they officially adopted the name.
> The Big 10 hasn’t had 10 schools since 1990, only 3 years after they officially adopted the name.
The Big 10 has been the Big 10 since 1916 when Michigan rejoined.
I mean, sure, technically they were the “Intercollegiate Conference of Faculty Representatives” until 1987, but no one actually called them that.
>in the spirit of celebrating peaceful achievement. Maybe a much smaller take on it would go back to those roots.
It is blasphemous that countries actively waging war or passively engaging in proxy wars or other conflicts (eg: trade wars) get to play in the Olympics.
The first requirement to participating should be that the country is at peace with others, in the literal sense. Yes, this is going to evict like 90% of the world including countries like the US, but this is a philosophical hill worth dying on.
What if participation helps mollify the conflict?
The rhetoric should be "You wanna play? Then declare peace with your enemies.", not "You wanna play? Let's see what bullshit we can craft so you can play without making peace." leading to nonsense like Americans and Russians playing despite literally waging war, and so on.
You just restated the context for my question. Your idealism is getting in the way of this discussion, I think.
> They're over-the-top with their trademarks too, especially for a nominally well-intentioned non-profit.
Agreed, it's amazing people put up with this part of them. The NFL is similar with Super Bowl trademarks (petty to the point where they tried to trademark "The Big Game" when people started using it), but they don't pretend to be about bringing the world together in peace and unity.
Better: let's go back to basics.
One city: Athens. After the first year it suddenly becomes a lot less expensive to maintain the infrastructure. Especially if all participating nations are asked a sum depending on their GDP.
And all participants naked before the gods as it was done originally.
> One city: Athens
In spirit, it's a neat idea. In practice, it would mean that for much of Asia and the entirety of the Americas the events are never aired at an ideal time. Shifting the geography allows for the prime viewing experience to shift with it. That's part of what I love about Watanabe's idea: everyone always gets a prime viewing experience of at least some of the sports.
The broadcast signals could in principle be recorded onto some manner of magnetic tape, then read back off that tape and rebroadcast a few hours later at whichever time is ideal for different parts of the world.
Utter madness, if the tape were magnetic, spoons would get stuck on it and clog the machine.
(in a weird way, this post makes me feel like I'm honing my skills to become an AI sceptic)
I know you're being a little cheeky, but if you think "tape delay" is some sort of solution to the problem I voiced then you're not really being serious. While NBC certainly improved their primetime experience this time around, it's not at all the same as actually watching the events live. This is doubly true since the results of many of those contests are widely publicized before their primetime airing.
Is Greece really that bad of a compromise timezone? It's GMT+2, compared to GMT+8 for Beijing and GMT-5 for NYC/DC. It's pretty much just West Coast US and Australia who get really screwed, which is probably as good as you're going to get for a global event.
The whole of the Americas gets screwed at GMT+2. My point is there is no good compromise timezone at all, that's why I think hosting it in one city is a very bad one. The status quo is better than that.
But the status quo sucks too. I love the idea of having multiple cities hosting around the world at the same time.
Eh, not really -- Peru is also GMT-5, and Brazil is only GMT-3.
The Paris Olympics ran 9am-midnight, which puts it at 2am-5pm going from Athens to GMT-5. Sure, you've got a few hours in the morning which are too early, but that's still a lot of Olympics happening during daylight hours for most of the Americas.
"Happening during daylight hours" is fine, but if that's all it ever is for you then it diminishes the relevance over time because to most the events will be watching something that you already know the outcome of. Modern society is not built for the success of tape-delay sporting events.
I'm not saying it's not watchable, I am saying that makes it a wholly different event for everyone in the Americas. It's basically the UEFA Euro: good enough for enthusiasts, accessible enough to check-in on for most, not situated to garner large-scale attention (and thus, in the longer-term, interest).
So they cannot wear a flag emblem, unless it's tattooed on them maybe.
Temporary body paint would be acceptable, and necessary for athlete identification in larger events like triathlon and marathon.
Ah, body paint technology, I really wonder what would they come up that would improve performance...
I think a better solution is to have the olympics rotate between 3 or 4 cities. That way they can re-use all the stadiums and infrastructure.
Reusing stadiums every 3-4 olympics wouldn't be super helpful. That is 12-16 years between hosting again. You'd realistically only get 2 games out of your locations before you'd be rebuilding it. Which admittedly is 2x as many times as you get out of most games, but its not a particularly big drop in the bucket in the grand scheme.
This gets suggested over and over again. Sometimes people say it should be in one city. The romantics suggest Athens (because the Greeks invented the thing) but the practical suggestion is Los Angeles.
An alternative is to just drop the whole thing.
I really don't hate that at all. 24 hours of live sports sounds fantastic, especially when the games are being held on the other side of the world so you either watch 12 hours delayed or are up at 2am to catch it live. You'd still have some events that you'd have to watch at odd hours, but you'd have the option of watching something else live.
Also lessening the burden of host cities to build up infrastructure to host the world for a month only to be left with unused/underused facilities left to rot is a win.
Euros 2020 did that and everyone hated it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UEFA_Euro_2020
2030 FIFA World Cup will be in 3 contentes and 6 countries. Madness. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2030_FIFA_World_Cup
To be fair the FIFA world cup has usually been split among many cities. Putting it in different countries changes almost nothing.
Brazil hosted it all over their country so it completely irrelevant if those cities were in brazil or an adjoining country due to the size of brazil and how hard it is to travel to some of their FIFA sites.
Not sure the comparison exactly tracks, because the teams need to be traveling.
Unless I misunderstood something, unless you'd be competing in two wildly different disciplines you'd be in one place. Unless they separate like 100m and 800m running :P
And for fans traveling along? Well...
Why not just host it in the same place every time? Greece would be the obvious choice. Think of all the money and co2 You could save.
But oh wait - that would make it much harder for IOC members to extract bribes… so it’ll never happen.
The problem is the coverage. I stopped watching a long time ago. The hosts are terrible. The social backstories are insufferable. It's impossible to watch your favorite <insert sport>... I'd tune in to a live streamed event, but I'm sure they'd screw it up somehow.