The Summer games have so many events and many of the events are either obscure, such as kayaking and air rifle, or redundant, such as soccer, golf & tennis. So what are the premier Summer Olympics events? I'd say women's gymnastics and the 100 meters race. The swimming events most definitely matter to the countries with dominant swimmers. But most countries don't have one.
I agree with Steve that basketball could be the premier international competition except for the US being so dominant.
I find the Winter Olympics to be a superior international competition. For one, there is a consistent theme of contests involving ice or snow. The organizers keep coming up with variations on this theme but one way or another it is a contest of sliding on a slick surface.
The Summer games are a cacophony of land, air & water contests. This allows just about every country to have a sport, but the overall event is so vast and discombobulated I find it impossible to keep track. On one hand, there is the surprise of flipping the channel to see what strange event is showing. On the other hand, the obscurity of many of these events makes it a challenge to figure out the nature of the contest - I'm still trying to understand handball and the foul system in water polo.
10 meter air rifle shooting is the biggest organized rifle competition in the world. Not having it at the Olympics would be like not having the 100 meter dash in track and field.
The 5 minutes of air rifle I watched today were bizarre. The ladies were wearing some type of protective clothing. They did some ritual in how they aimed the rifle. It all took place in a very sterile environment. My immediate observation was the Olympics wants a shooting sport but guns, even air rifles, are on the edge of being too dangerous.
Give me bb guns and tin cans and shoot from the hip trigger pulling. That would be a relatable shooting contest.
And to the point, I'm not opposed to air rifle being an Olympic sport. But appreciate that the standard for something being an Olympic contest is screwy. If there are already international air rifle competitions, why the redundancy of adding an Olympic competition? Appreciate that I feel the same way about soccer, tennis & golf.
And for the shooting sports, a criteria seems to be to have equipment that costs many thousands of dollars. That sets a very restrictive bar on who can actually compete in that contest. Yes, gymnastics is also an exclusive club of competitors. But at least the general viewer finds gymnastics enjoyable to watch.
> Appreciate that I feel the same way about soccer, tennis & golf.
Men's soccer at least places some restrictions on who can play in the Olympics in terms of age and experience, but there is no reason for tennis, golf, or women's soccer to be part of the Olympics. I would add baseball to the list, but it is not being held this year. It is scheduled to return to Los Angeles 2028.
Agree. The Olympics used to be strictly for amateurs. But then the Soviet teams with their "salary men" athletes began beating the American college players. So the games were opened for all competitors.
Ironically, now that pro sports contracts are so lucrative, pro players are becoming less inclined to play in international competitions - this is especially true for baseball pitchers who worry their arm could fail on any pitch.
> I find the Winter Olympics to be a superior international competition. For one, there is a consistent theme of contests involving ice or snow.
I believe this is by rule. That's why basketball is not played in the Winter Olympics even though it is an indoor sport. The Winter Olympic event I enjoy the most is curling as there seems to be a lot of strategy involved without as much pure athleticism. Of course I only think about it once every four years, and it hasn't helped that the last three Winter Olympics were held in Asia, but the next three are in Milan, Nice, and Salt Lake City, so maybe that will repique my interest.
Sorry but once they let in the NBA players in they ruined basketball. Could they maybe limit it to players who went pro since last Olympics? No reason 35 year old pros should be representing USA in basketball.
In 1988, the Soviet Union, led by a bunch of good Lithuanians, beat the American collegians by 5 points in a fine game. But then the US sent pros in 1992, as the two big European powers, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, were breaking up. One or the other would have been okay, but the combination of the two things happening meant that the US has to screw up badly like in 2004 not to win.
A united Yugoslavia with Jokic and Doncic would be a worthy rival to the US, but not the separate states. Thus the US crushed Serbia yesterday.
I will say that the 1992 Dream Team caused the rest of the world to step up their games, resulting in the current NBA having more of an international flair. As an aside, I wonder what actual Africans think when they watch the American Olympic team. Can they identify which country/tribe the ancestors of our players would be from?
As far as I can tell, the last white player we had was Kevin Love, who participated in London 2012. Obviously we have had some mixed-breed players, but I am using the one-drop rule.
That 1988 squad was led by the most overrated coach in any sport. John Thompson. Who with all that talent at Georgetown managed 1 national title in 30 years then installed himself as Godfather of the program and made them hire his lackeys and offspring. They still haven’t recovered. What a mess!
The problem is that the distinction between amateur and professional collapses when dealing with communist countries. Thus it makes sense why it ultimately got removed during the Cold War.
I can't remember where I first saw it pointed out a few years ago, but what if we compiled a medal table that involved the number of medals that are actually awarded to athletes? Basketball has a twelve-player roster, so twelve players get medals. The US swept the gold medals in the basketball (real basketball, not the 3x3 nonsense) in Tokyo. We got 24 gold medals, but it only counts as two. Meanwhile judo had fourteen different sex/weight classes plus one team event (with two bronzes given out in each event, for sixty total medals), and Japan won 12 medals. Why should Japan's dominance of judo be worth six times as many medals as the USA's dominance of basketball?
Similarly, the US did well in a lot of other team sports: gold in women's volleyball and water polo, silver in softball and baseball, bronze in soccer, and various medals in swimming and running relays.
I’d rank running at the top by far: to me as an ex-runner it seems the purest of sports: just you and your strength, with some admixture of tactics.
Swimming, cycling and rowing follow closely in importance, in my view, along with field events like javelin, and pentathlon and decathlon.
Basketball? I laughed out loud when I read Steve’s opinion that it was important. I don’t think most people outside America know it’s an Olympic sport. As an Englishman I might argue for cricket, and cause similar amusement; cricket was once an Olympic sport. But in general i don’t favour team sports: to me, the Olympics is about individual striving. (I admit an inconsistency in favouring cycling, which has team events; and running does too in the form of the relay. But they do not fall into the category of ‘sportsball’.)
I agree with everything you wrote. I would add wrestling to that list of sports you provided. Wrestling, like track and field, goes all the way back to the ancient start of the Olympic games. As an Englishman wrestling may not be of much interest to you. There are very few western Europeans at the highest level of the sport. Wrestling is very popular in USA high school and college and the international competitions of which the Olympics are the pinnacle. Sadly the Olympics proposed dropping wrestling but relented after massive pushback from USA, Eastern Europe, Turkey, Iran and other Central Asian countries.
My problem with wrestling is that the action is too fast for me to follow who just scored. Same with fencing. Volleyball has a bit of the same problem with everybody jumping at the net and I can't see which side of the net the ball came down on. In contrast, beach volleyball is instantly legible despite not having watched it for 4 years.
If wrestling could somehow be made so casual viewers could make sense out of it, it would definitely deserve to rank with track and a few others at the top of the Olympic hierarchy.
You're right about fencing. Here in Hong Kong, everybody is suddenly a huge fencing fan/expert, because two HK fencers -- one male, one female -- have won gold medals in Paris. The female one also is a graduate of Stanford, to which she was admitted no doubt in large part because of her fencing skills. This possibility has elevated fencing to The Extracurricular of Great Desire here among parents of school kids looking to get their progeny into name universities.
But watching fencing is nearly impossible. The action is so split-second I have no idea what's going on. This turns out to be the case for many people, it seems, including referees, as both of the HK fencers won their golds in extremely close matches in which the decisive point could pretty much have gone either way. The men's final resulted in the Italian loser filing a formal complaint. This is not a great way for a sport to be conducted. Maybe touch-sensitive suits and robot judging will be the future?
Basketball is a very big sport around the world, contending for 2nd biggest team sport after soccer. It's been huge in Southern European countries for generations, who find it a good complement in their famous athletic clubs for soccer.
In high school track meets, when three medals are awarded per event they use a 5-3-1 scoring system, so that's what I use when I compare countries in the Olympics. I always thought that counting each medal equally was silly, but that's how newspapers tend to publish the results.
I disagree with your assessment that the marathon the most important event and I would argue that it doesn't have any importance. Who actually watches an entire marathon? Can anyone name any gold medalist from the marathon? The only American to win is Frank Shorter, but does that name mean anything to you? If so, does it mean anything to anyone under 60?
I would say the purest event is the 100m dash. The most popular event is probably women's gymnastics because that causes women to watch. Mary Lou Retton may be the most famous American Olympian ever. I don't think that anyone really cares about the decathlon, but obviously Bruce Jenner was able to sell a lot of Wheaties because of his gold medal.
"The only American to win is Frank Shorter, but does that name mean anything to you?"
Shorter's 1972 gold medal pretty much launched the jogging craze in America. It would definitely rank in the most culturally influential Olympic accomplishments.
Golf is the most pointless. They are doing it to raise the popularity of golf in countries that follow the Olympics but not golf: China, I guess, Russia, maybe Brazil. So it's just an exhibition.
I think this is why a quantitative approach to the Olympics is kind of silly. The entire point is the stories which, at least when I still enjoyed the Olympics (Beijing) captured the imagination. Air rifle mentioned above is a joke (as a compelling sport not as a test of motor skills or whatever) and so are its medals, while something like wrestling can be compelling, but to appreciate it, you really should be an insider.
I struggle to see most women's sports as anything but tallest midget contests, but something like gymnastics can really transcend that with its qualitative and occasionally art-like qualities.
The entire point as it were is to capture the imagination of your country men or the world. This is why, even though I have recently whined about it on Aporia, Jesse Owens at Berlin is still great, even though the Aryans won the thing.
The San Marino wrestler, Myles Amine, that took 3rd was born and raised in Michigan along with his parents. He was able to compete on the San Marino Olympic team thru his maternal grand father. He couldn’t make it onto team USA, as USA wrestling has gotten extremely good over the last 12ish years. And a team USA member took first at his weight class, David Taylor from Ohio. His medal should count for team USA… or not count at all.
Also, shouldn’t wrestling be one of the most important sports since it’s as old as the marathon? While the original Marathon was taking place in Ancient Greece at the battle of Marathon, while Pheidippides was running the first marathon, the Greeks and Persians, wrestled…. And the Greeks won…. And a lot of Persians died
Also, it’s a pretty level playing field with wrestling, very low start up costs and not much for equipment to compete. Anyone and everyone can/does do it. You put two 3 year old boys together, they’ll have a foot race and wrestle within the first hour.
High school wrestlers seem to have successful adult careers in whatever they go into more than even most athletes do (and athletes do pretty well for themselves in life on average.)
Another issue is that big powerhouses like the US are artificially restricted in terms of medals won because they are artificially restricted in terms of number of entrants. As somebody mentioned above, the San Marino bronze medal wrestler was an American who wasn't good enough to get the one spot in the Olympics for his weight class, so went to the Olympics for his distance ancestral country and brought home a bronze.
Judging by the participants, it's big in the big economies like China, Japan, US, Western Europe, and especially Eastern Europe. It became a huge deal in the 1970s Olga Korbut-Nadia Komaneci era before Americans could compete.
The Russians bring ballet skills to things like arm movements that the Americans can't quite match.
I had assumed 400m freestyle was the top swimming event
The Summer games have so many events and many of the events are either obscure, such as kayaking and air rifle, or redundant, such as soccer, golf & tennis. So what are the premier Summer Olympics events? I'd say women's gymnastics and the 100 meters race. The swimming events most definitely matter to the countries with dominant swimmers. But most countries don't have one.
I agree with Steve that basketball could be the premier international competition except for the US being so dominant.
I find the Winter Olympics to be a superior international competition. For one, there is a consistent theme of contests involving ice or snow. The organizers keep coming up with variations on this theme but one way or another it is a contest of sliding on a slick surface.
The Summer games are a cacophony of land, air & water contests. This allows just about every country to have a sport, but the overall event is so vast and discombobulated I find it impossible to keep track. On one hand, there is the surprise of flipping the channel to see what strange event is showing. On the other hand, the obscurity of many of these events makes it a challenge to figure out the nature of the contest - I'm still trying to understand handball and the foul system in water polo.
10 meter air rifle shooting is the biggest organized rifle competition in the world. Not having it at the Olympics would be like not having the 100 meter dash in track and field.
The 5 minutes of air rifle I watched today were bizarre. The ladies were wearing some type of protective clothing. They did some ritual in how they aimed the rifle. It all took place in a very sterile environment. My immediate observation was the Olympics wants a shooting sport but guns, even air rifles, are on the edge of being too dangerous.
Give me bb guns and tin cans and shoot from the hip trigger pulling. That would be a relatable shooting contest.
And to the point, I'm not opposed to air rifle being an Olympic sport. But appreciate that the standard for something being an Olympic contest is screwy. If there are already international air rifle competitions, why the redundancy of adding an Olympic competition? Appreciate that I feel the same way about soccer, tennis & golf.
And for the shooting sports, a criteria seems to be to have equipment that costs many thousands of dollars. That sets a very restrictive bar on who can actually compete in that contest. Yes, gymnastics is also an exclusive club of competitors. But at least the general viewer finds gymnastics enjoyable to watch.
> Appreciate that I feel the same way about soccer, tennis & golf.
Men's soccer at least places some restrictions on who can play in the Olympics in terms of age and experience, but there is no reason for tennis, golf, or women's soccer to be part of the Olympics. I would add baseball to the list, but it is not being held this year. It is scheduled to return to Los Angeles 2028.
Agree. The Olympics used to be strictly for amateurs. But then the Soviet teams with their "salary men" athletes began beating the American college players. So the games were opened for all competitors.
Ironically, now that pro sports contracts are so lucrative, pro players are becoming less inclined to play in international competitions - this is especially true for baseball pitchers who worry their arm could fail on any pitch.
> I find the Winter Olympics to be a superior international competition. For one, there is a consistent theme of contests involving ice or snow.
I believe this is by rule. That's why basketball is not played in the Winter Olympics even though it is an indoor sport. The Winter Olympic event I enjoy the most is curling as there seems to be a lot of strategy involved without as much pure athleticism. Of course I only think about it once every four years, and it hasn't helped that the last three Winter Olympics were held in Asia, but the next three are in Milan, Nice, and Salt Lake City, so maybe that will repique my interest.
The 2030 winter games are going to be in the French Alps.
Sorry but once they let in the NBA players in they ruined basketball. Could they maybe limit it to players who went pro since last Olympics? No reason 35 year old pros should be representing USA in basketball.
In 1988, the Soviet Union, led by a bunch of good Lithuanians, beat the American collegians by 5 points in a fine game. But then the US sent pros in 1992, as the two big European powers, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, were breaking up. One or the other would have been okay, but the combination of the two things happening meant that the US has to screw up badly like in 2004 not to win.
A united Yugoslavia with Jokic and Doncic would be a worthy rival to the US, but not the separate states. Thus the US crushed Serbia yesterday.
I will say that the 1992 Dream Team caused the rest of the world to step up their games, resulting in the current NBA having more of an international flair. As an aside, I wonder what actual Africans think when they watch the American Olympic team. Can they identify which country/tribe the ancestors of our players would be from?
As far as I can tell, the last white player we had was Kevin Love, who participated in London 2012. Obviously we have had some mixed-breed players, but I am using the one-drop rule.
That 1988 squad was led by the most overrated coach in any sport. John Thompson. Who with all that talent at Georgetown managed 1 national title in 30 years then installed himself as Godfather of the program and made them hire his lackeys and offspring. They still haven’t recovered. What a mess!
The problem is that the distinction between amateur and professional collapses when dealing with communist countries. Thus it makes sense why it ultimately got removed during the Cold War.
And the distinction between amateur and professional is hard to maintain in hypercapitalist states as well.
How so?
Too much money to pass up.
Wimbledon was an amateur-only tennis tournament through 1967, but it switched to Open format in 1968 as tennis became a more lucrative career.
I can't remember where I first saw it pointed out a few years ago, but what if we compiled a medal table that involved the number of medals that are actually awarded to athletes? Basketball has a twelve-player roster, so twelve players get medals. The US swept the gold medals in the basketball (real basketball, not the 3x3 nonsense) in Tokyo. We got 24 gold medals, but it only counts as two. Meanwhile judo had fourteen different sex/weight classes plus one team event (with two bronzes given out in each event, for sixty total medals), and Japan won 12 medals. Why should Japan's dominance of judo be worth six times as many medals as the USA's dominance of basketball?
Similarly, the US did well in a lot of other team sports: gold in women's volleyball and water polo, silver in softball and baseball, bronze in soccer, and various medals in swimming and running relays.
> what if we compiled a medal table that involved the number of medals that are actually awarded to athletes?
This may be the dumbest thing I have read on the internet lately
Obviously, more athletic talent goes into basketball, so winning gold would seem like a bigger accomplishment.
I think the 100m has been the biggest event since the era of Ben Johnson and Carl Lewis by a fairly wide margin.
The mens basketball will be the biggest event *when* the USA has a legit challenger, which it does not in Paris.
This year the mens 1500m and the womens 400 hurdles seem like very anticipated races.
The 400m hurdles seems to come up with races that stick in my memory the best, from 1972 to 2021.
The men's final will be objectively speaking the most insane race ever run in that event, but the women's final seems to be exciting trackies more
I’d rank running at the top by far: to me as an ex-runner it seems the purest of sports: just you and your strength, with some admixture of tactics.
Swimming, cycling and rowing follow closely in importance, in my view, along with field events like javelin, and pentathlon and decathlon.
Basketball? I laughed out loud when I read Steve’s opinion that it was important. I don’t think most people outside America know it’s an Olympic sport. As an Englishman I might argue for cricket, and cause similar amusement; cricket was once an Olympic sport. But in general i don’t favour team sports: to me, the Olympics is about individual striving. (I admit an inconsistency in favouring cycling, which has team events; and running does too in the form of the relay. But they do not fall into the category of ‘sportsball’.)
I agree with everything you wrote. I would add wrestling to that list of sports you provided. Wrestling, like track and field, goes all the way back to the ancient start of the Olympic games. As an Englishman wrestling may not be of much interest to you. There are very few western Europeans at the highest level of the sport. Wrestling is very popular in USA high school and college and the international competitions of which the Olympics are the pinnacle. Sadly the Olympics proposed dropping wrestling but relented after massive pushback from USA, Eastern Europe, Turkey, Iran and other Central Asian countries.
My problem with wrestling is that the action is too fast for me to follow who just scored. Same with fencing. Volleyball has a bit of the same problem with everybody jumping at the net and I can't see which side of the net the ball came down on. In contrast, beach volleyball is instantly legible despite not having watched it for 4 years.
If wrestling could somehow be made so casual viewers could make sense out of it, it would definitely deserve to rank with track and a few others at the top of the Olympic hierarchy.
You're right about fencing. Here in Hong Kong, everybody is suddenly a huge fencing fan/expert, because two HK fencers -- one male, one female -- have won gold medals in Paris. The female one also is a graduate of Stanford, to which she was admitted no doubt in large part because of her fencing skills. This possibility has elevated fencing to The Extracurricular of Great Desire here among parents of school kids looking to get their progeny into name universities.
But watching fencing is nearly impossible. The action is so split-second I have no idea what's going on. This turns out to be the case for many people, it seems, including referees, as both of the HK fencers won their golds in extremely close matches in which the decisive point could pretty much have gone either way. The men's final resulted in the Italian loser filing a formal complaint. This is not a great way for a sport to be conducted. Maybe touch-sensitive suits and robot judging will be the future?
Basketball is a very big sport around the world, contending for 2nd biggest team sport after soccer. It's been huge in Southern European countries for generations, who find it a good complement in their famous athletic clubs for soccer.
In high school track meets, when three medals are awarded per event they use a 5-3-1 scoring system, so that's what I use when I compare countries in the Olympics. I always thought that counting each medal equally was silly, but that's how newspapers tend to publish the results.
I disagree with your assessment that the marathon the most important event and I would argue that it doesn't have any importance. Who actually watches an entire marathon? Can anyone name any gold medalist from the marathon? The only American to win is Frank Shorter, but does that name mean anything to you? If so, does it mean anything to anyone under 60?
I would say the purest event is the 100m dash. The most popular event is probably women's gymnastics because that causes women to watch. Mary Lou Retton may be the most famous American Olympian ever. I don't think that anyone really cares about the decathlon, but obviously Bruce Jenner was able to sell a lot of Wheaties because of his gold medal.
The dumbest event that is held is golf.
"The only American to win is Frank Shorter, but does that name mean anything to you?"
Shorter's 1972 gold medal pretty much launched the jogging craze in America. It would definitely rank in the most culturally influential Olympic accomplishments.
Golf is the most pointless. They are doing it to raise the popularity of golf in countries that follow the Olympics but not golf: China, I guess, Russia, maybe Brazil. So it's just an exhibition.
I think this is why a quantitative approach to the Olympics is kind of silly. The entire point is the stories which, at least when I still enjoyed the Olympics (Beijing) captured the imagination. Air rifle mentioned above is a joke (as a compelling sport not as a test of motor skills or whatever) and so are its medals, while something like wrestling can be compelling, but to appreciate it, you really should be an insider.
I struggle to see most women's sports as anything but tallest midget contests, but something like gymnastics can really transcend that with its qualitative and occasionally art-like qualities.
The entire point as it were is to capture the imagination of your country men or the world. This is why, even though I have recently whined about it on Aporia, Jesse Owens at Berlin is still great, even though the Aryans won the thing.
The San Marino wrestler, Myles Amine, that took 3rd was born and raised in Michigan along with his parents. He was able to compete on the San Marino Olympic team thru his maternal grand father. He couldn’t make it onto team USA, as USA wrestling has gotten extremely good over the last 12ish years. And a team USA member took first at his weight class, David Taylor from Ohio. His medal should count for team USA… or not count at all.
Also, shouldn’t wrestling be one of the most important sports since it’s as old as the marathon? While the original Marathon was taking place in Ancient Greece at the battle of Marathon, while Pheidippides was running the first marathon, the Greeks and Persians, wrestled…. And the Greeks won…. And a lot of Persians died
Also, it’s a pretty level playing field with wrestling, very low start up costs and not much for equipment to compete. Anyone and everyone can/does do it. You put two 3 year old boys together, they’ll have a foot race and wrestle within the first hour.
High school wrestlers seem to have successful adult careers in whatever they go into more than even most athletes do (and athletes do pretty well for themselves in life on average.)
Doesn't globalization screw up these models? Does it take into account how effective each "country" is at importing (sorry assimilating) athletes?
Another issue is that big powerhouses like the US are artificially restricted in terms of medals won because they are artificially restricted in terms of number of entrants. As somebody mentioned above, the San Marino bronze medal wrestler was an American who wasn't good enough to get the one spot in the Olympics for his weight class, so went to the Olympics for his distance ancestral country and brought home a bronze.
Modern pentathlon, a sport meant to emulate soldiering and nobility.
Handicapping is for the Paralympics
Is women’s gymnastics a big deal everywhere, or just in the US because we usually win?
Judging by the participants, it's big in the big economies like China, Japan, US, Western Europe, and especially Eastern Europe. It became a huge deal in the 1970s Olga Korbut-Nadia Komaneci era before Americans could compete.
The Russians bring ballet skills to things like arm movements that the Americans can't quite match.
Whichever Nations wins the Gold in Women's Gymnastics and Women's Beach Volleyball.
And makes all the replays free to the Public, especially on X.
Other than that, I like all the Sports.