The Olympics are outdated: fans are bored, ratings are falling. There needs to be a real renewal

Let’s exhale, the Olympics are over. The 2020 Games for Russia turned out to be decent in terms of results, taking into account all the problems. And a failure from the point of view of the fans. This time the problem is not only ours.

On the one hand, there is a purely personal feeling. Among my acquaintances there are no people who watch more or less all the starts. Or at least daily broadcasts of some kind. Even people who are generally interested in sports and do it themselves. The vast majority of people I know either didn’t watch the Olympics at all or were only marginally interested. I suspect it’s the same for you.

They don’t watch the Olympics

Importantly, we’re not talking about Games fans: these are the people who love everything about the Olympics. They’ll watch any kind. It’s just that this percentage of the hardcore audience is always low.

But there are such figures: “The absolute majority of Russians (97%) do not know the name of any Russian athlete who will compete at the Summer Olympics,” VTsIOM calculated. – 1% named three-time world high jump champion Maria Lasitskene.” Although the most beautiful figure was in another question – about the sports a person plans to follow: 8% of respondents named figure skating.

One could wave one’s hand and say that the survey simply included unlucky participants. In fact, almost two-thirds of the Russians surveyed – 61% – were planning to follow the Olympics. Although only 15% planned to watch regular broadcasts of the competitions.

But Mediascope ratings have arrived – it analyzes the popularity of programs on Russian television. And everything is sad there too. According to the data from July 19 to July 25 (including weekends), only the broadcast of the Olympics opening ceremony, which “Pervyi” ran for four hours, made it to the top 10 programs on TV. Otherwise, sports broadcasts collected ratings of 1.8-2%. In the week from July 26 to August 1, the broadcasts of gymnastics performed well. The July 28 broadcast of the all-around competition drew a rating of 2.4% (however, “Mentor Wars 11” got a 2.9% rating).

The interest was somewhat accelerated when it came to medals and sports that Russians planned to watch: gymnastics, synchronized swimming. Rhythmic gymnastics on “First” on August 7 showed the best numbers – 3.2% rating and 22.4% share. Much higher than the closing ceremony (2.6% / 14.7%). However, these figures are only for Moscow for the week of August 2-8, data for Russia are not yet available.

Week from August 2 to August 8: 100 most popular programs among Muscovites over 4 years of age

The broadcasts of the Games in general seemed to have a good share – the percentage of all those who turned on the TV at a particular time. On average – 16.2%. Although it is important to clarify that sporting events in principle take a high share. Many viewers turn on the TV at a particular time precisely because of a sports broadcast. During the recent Euro even not the most rated matches had a share of 12%.

And here the fact that the broadcasts were on at inconvenient times played in favor of the Olympics. Since it was not prime time, they had no competition in the form of humorous, news or political talk shows.

And it would seem that the problem of diminished interest in one particular Russia shouldn’t affect anything but Russia itself. Fans are sick of the doping scandals, we’re flagless, expectations were also so-so – so not many viewers.

Ratings in the USA are the worst in 33 years

However, things are also very bad in the US. American television has broken through the worst Olympic opening in 33 years – the NBC exclusive was watched by 16.7 million viewers. And there, too, there’s a telling decline from tournament to tournament: audiences are down 37% from 2016, when 26.5 million people watched the opening of the games in Rio de Janeiro, and down 59% from 2012, with 40.7 million people seeing the ceremony in London. The situation is so bad that NBC Universal is giving advertisers extra airtime because the Games didn’t garner an audience.

Simone Biles.

A survey of U.S. citizens demonstrates how close Russians and Americans are: Monmouth University conducted a poll in late July on interest in the Olympics, and 41% of respondents said they were not interested in the Olympics at all and only 16% were following the performances.

There was also a question about the timing: 36% of Americans believe that the Olympics should have been canceled during the pandemic. However, it’s unlikely to have had that much of an impact on interest in the games, which have already happened anyway.

The good news is that Discovery (owner of Eurosport TV channel) seems to have good ratings in Europe: 275 million viewers in Europe for the first nine days of the Games. However, there is a possibility of cross-counting, Kommersant notes. According to the contract with the IOC, Discovery is obliged to give sublicenses to broadcasters from the pool of countries for at least 200 hours of broadcasts. And as a result, one viewer was counted several times.

The Internet has changed the rules of the game, and the IOC is sticking to the old tactics

You could say the OIs are going online, but neither is. The roughly 17 million viewers of the opening ceremony are all platforms, including NBCOlympics.com and the NBC Sports app. The viewing stats on the runet aren’t admirable either. YouTube’s numbers are pretty average, unless you take scandalous headlines (gymnasts) or rowdy victories (gymnasts’ first gold in 25 years, another Lasitskene win). And not even a single service to watch the broadcasts has gone down, as it did during Euro 2020.

On the Internet, the Games compete not even with political talk shows, but with every possible form of entertainment, from TV series to video games. And on every level, the Games are losing the battle for attention. Over the past 10 years, the viewer’s attitude toward time allocation has changed as much as possible. And that includes sports fans. If top soccer clubs are hysterically running to create a closed league to keep their audience and admit that they are competing with Fortnite, what can we say about the Olympics?

Importantly, none of this in any way questions the greatness of the athletes. Many trade their health for a medal and a sporting principle. And some have their whole lives tied up in nothing but sport. They deserve respect and recognition.

Tokyo.

It’s just that the International Olympic Committee missed the burst of technology. Used to be you had to catch every broadcast of the Games on TV and it was a Godlike People Event. Now it’s just one of many. The attention span of the mass fan has eroded. Here, even Lionel Messi’s departure from Barcelona doesn’t seem quite so historic. “The end of an era happens every week.

The Summer Olympics roll on, feeling like a major event in the world of sports. And it hasn’t been that way for a long time. The IOC decided that people weren’t enough and added 33 more disciplines after Rio 2016. And only five really new sports: BMX freestyle, skateboarding, surfing, karate and rock climbing.

At the same time, many of the former sports already have a high threshold of entry – shooting, equestrian and other “classic” competitions still need to be sorted out. It is the increase in the number of starts that blurs the value of each particular victory story for the mass fan.

If Vitalina Batsarashkina had not shown the amulet from The Witcher, it is unlikely that so much would have been said about her outside of shooting competitions. A simple element of mass culture brought the athlete closer to ordinary people and that was enough.

Vitalina Batsarashkina.

Narrowly focused sports are losing audiences, and some traditionally popular in the Olympics (traditionally so) are losing tournaments to competitors. The same Olympic soccer is not taken seriously by many people, and the top teams are taking their third squads there. Watching 38-year-old Dani Alves heroically play for Brazil is certainly curious, but at most in the hylactic mode.

The problem with the Summer Olympics is ego and being stuck in the glorious past. In its current format, the Games on the one hand lose their sense of elitism. After all, something major happens in sports every year, from UFC fights to El Clasico. And it can be followed continuously and it is not necessary to understand all the subtleties. On the other hand, they close in on themselves, building a barrier between the audience of ordinary people. And it is mass appeal that creates an influx of new athletes.

It is necessary not to pile everything in a pile, but to organize and simplify it

The way out is to first recognize that in the XXI century fans and spectators need to be attracted in a different way. The magic word “Olympics” alone does not work anymore. Both sports and athletes need to be promoted at the level of top sports organizations: like the English Premier League, UFC, NFL (although they also have the problem of declining interest). Not just when they are already super-media personalities.

Especially since, for the athletes themselves, the Games are still just as much a life event. And following the drama – with a happy ending for one and a collapse for the other – is much more interesting than just “faster, higher, stronger”.

Usain Bolt in Rio 2016.

It’s ironic that this year the IOC added the word “together” to the traditional slogan. Although it’s about time for sports to separate to form themselves into something independent. Even if for the sake of that we have to transform the format of the Olympic Games from “let’s fit 339 events into one month” to something simpler and clearer.

And yes, the future lies in new sports. Really popular ones. Because it’s not only a fresh audience, but also the very new limits of what’s possible. In traditional sports, the fanfare of a new world record is exploding less and less often. The thesis “the essence of the Olympic movement suffers from the dominance of new-fangled sports or disciplines without the slightest intrigue” is very dubious. What “essence” should be taken? Faster, taller, stronger? What could be more appropriate than rock climbing? And Russia has a long-standing Soviet tradition here. Or what is the difference between “new-fashioned” surfing and new-fashioned snowboarding in the Winter Games? Only because Vic Wild took medals for us there?

Skateboarding at the 2020 Olympics.

Listen to Tony Hawk, he knows exactly how to bring the underground to the level of global popularity: “When I was growing up, I didn’t care if skateboarding was in the Olympics or not. Because we already had our own ‘scene’ and skateboarding was way more fun and popular than most Olympic sports. So I feel like the Olympics need skateboarding now more than we need the Olympics.”

There’s an argument about the young age of athletes in the new sports, and it’s even more controversial. If athletes should be banned because of their youth, then figure skating will have to be shut down. And for some reason there are no questions about the 14-year-old swimmer Cristina Egerszegi, who took gold and silver in 1988. Or the participants of these Games: 15-year-old Katie Grimes (gymnastics), 17-year-old Errion Knighton (swimming) and 12-year-old Hend Zaza (table tennis).

And for that matter, 13-year-old skateboarding bronze medalist Skye Brown is an athlete the IOC should cling to with all its teeth. Not just because of Skye’s raving popularity, who has 1.3 million followers on Instagram.

She is an example to all teenagers of what you can achieve in sports and why it’s worth it to dream the impossible. Skye has been skateboarding since the age of 3. By the time she was 13, she had won more than 50 competitions and her medal is hardly less deserved than the other Olympians. In Tokyo, she posted a post (400,000 likes and 5.3,000 comments!) about just that: “Today I’m happy to show the world how beautiful and creative skateboarding really is. I hope some of the girls watching this will think: why, I can do that too!”

Perhaps some of Skye’s subscribers or followers will indeed decide to follow her example. And connect not with skateboarding, but try a different kind. Because if this girl could do it, why not try gymnastics, volleyball, swimming.

Isn’t that what the Olympic Charter says: “Olympism, which combines sport with culture and education, seeks to create a way of life based on the joy of effort, the educational value of good example, social responsibility, and respect for universal basic ethical principles”.