(originally published on Medium in July 2024, before Paris Olympics 2024 took place)
Now that Paris Olympics 2024 is at our doorstep, I wanted to discuss how (ir)relevant some Olympic sports are for the 21st century and give some advise on how to modernize them. What are my qualifications to write such a piece? None! Well, one needn’t be qualified to find mistakes in others’ work and provide suggestions that are “guaranteed to work”. Also, qualifications sometimes come with quirks and prejudices. If you don’t believe me, just ask Mori-san, the former president of Tokyo Olympics, who received flak over his sexist remarks. Furthermore, I am living in 21st century with freedom of speech and a technology called “the internet”. Together, these two superpowers allow me to write whatever I want to whomever I want.
Now, let’s come to my suggestions on modernizing the Olympics. I have extensively researched the history of the Olympics before coming up with these and thus I expect some respect from the readers. You know what … I just got a word from the editor that I am not supposed to lie in a public piece of writing, even going by 21st century conventions. So, scratch my last statement and replace it with “I have read maybe one third of an article on the internet from a guy with 28 followers and saw two and half movies on the topic of the Olympics and thus I expect some respect from the readers for my patience in taking time to do that”.
Some Olympic Sports are Outdated
Olympics in their current form test the athletes for real modern day physical skills. I mean, some sports are fine — running, long-jump and all. Although I am surprised that running hasn’t replaced running with “Segway™-ing” or “e-scootering”. And some sports are somewhere on the spectrum from “relevant” to “museum stuff”. That would be your equestrians and all. I mean how many people do you see riding horses regularly (not counting British or Canadian police). But then there are sports that are highly relevant but only if you lived in 8th century Greece. It’s this third category of sports that I want to focus my suggestions on.
Outside of a sports arena or Brad Pitt’s movie Troy, have you ever seen someone throw a spear? I haven’t and that’s why I am questioning Javelin throw’s continued inclusion in Olympics. Who in this day and age ever finds herself in a situation when she would need to throw a spear? Or who even has a spare spear lying around just to be thrown? Before you answer that, try saying “spare spear” ten times and fast!
If the Olympics do want to keep a sport for throwing stuff, may I please suggest something more fitting to this age — throwing charity gala dinners. Where is the physical skill in that, you ask? Picking all that caviar for tasting and shaking hands with thousands of potential donors is a lot of work. But hang on … this sports category might be biased in favor of the super-rich and royalty. So what! Doesn’t golf have the same bias?
Another sport that comes to mind is boxing. If it was full freestyle combat, it would still have some relevance to modern age, especially in some sketchy neighborhoods of large cities. But the heavily padded gloves just undermine the whole thing. Nobody stops to put on their boxing gloves, if they coincidently had a pair, before throwing their fists in the face of a robber or an attacker. And that’s why wrestling and taekwondo may be closer to the real thing. Although they would need a makeover too. (And by the way, why are Krav-Maga and Jiu-jitsu not vying to be included in the games?)
Then there is archery. Same logic as javelin — how is archery relevant to today’s life. And with all those technical improvements in the bows, it hardly even resembles the long bows and recurve bows of yore. But you know what, archery looks cool and I am going to let it slide. (I wonder if that was the reasoning of IOC for keeping it all these years)
Fencing on the other hand is neither relevant nor looks cool and should be done away with.
Breaking down Olympic Sports
How about all the “game” sports? Those are your basketball, tennis, hockey etc. As such, they are a combination of various physical skills and do test the athletes on those skills. But their inclusion in the Olympics hinges entirely on their popularity with the audience. I would lobby for breaking them down into those fundamental physical skills and then let people compete. For example, let’s add the following sport categories under athletics –
1) Hitting an object. Relevance (to 21st century): useful for smashing cockroaches in an infested kitchen.
2) Catching an object. Relevance: useful for saving a baby’s life when its parents have let the stroller roll off the roof while taking a selfie.
3) Aiming a projectile at a target. Relevance: useful for scoring free mangoes from neighbor’s tree in summer. Wait, what? Kids don’t score free mangoes anymore? Oh I feel so bad for them!
All your game sports can now be covered in one or more of the above categories. Badminton, tennis, volleyball, and table-tennis are mostly category 1 (hitting). Basketball is a combination of throwing, category 2 (catching) and 3 (aiming). Rugby is throwing + running + category 2. Baseball and cricket are all three categories combined. Oh yeah, cricket will feature in the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles. “Why”, you wonder? Maybe India’s lobbying paid off (which was probably an attempt to increase the possibility of securing at least some medals). Anyway, there you have it for the “game” sports.
New Sports at Olympics?
Now, let me now propose some entirely new sports to be included in the Olympics to test some new physical skills that have become the bread and butter of people today.
“Stand”
Goal: longest time standing.
Relevance: standing on trams, trains or buses, or in line for iPhone, XBOX and fast-food.
Proposed categories: with Nike sneakers, with Adidas sneakers, barefoot, with and without a smartphone for entertainment.
Considerations: hiring line-sitters to stand in your place is not allowed.
“Touch”
(a scary name in the post-COVID world and no, it’s not about touching inappropriately at workplace or other places)
Goal: fastest typing on a touchscreen.
Relevance: no need to explain.
Proposed categories: two-handed, one-handed, blind-folded, while walking and sipping a fizzy drink.
Considerations: standard screen-size is needed, and so is a standard keyboard layout (I am hoping that it will inspire a uniform layout for computer keyboards worldwide too; a nerd can only hope), and also a standard fizzy drink.
Conclusion
That’s it. Those were all my suggestions to modernize the Olympics. And before you reject them because Olympics are an “ancient sacred tradition”, let me remind you that the games have already gone through some drastic changes over the decades and centuries. They have scrapped sports for one — motor-boating, tug of war (why was that discontinued, I wonder? Pulling seems to be a timeless skill), lacrosse etc. Then they have included new sports — skateboarding, rock climbing (Wait, why wasn’t that a part of the old Olympics already? Didn’t ancient Greeks have rocks to climb?), surfing etc. Paris 2024 will even include breakdancing as a sport category (with the name breaking)! And they have made changes to many existing sports too. For example, they switched from live pigeons to clay ones in shooting. A win for animal rights, I am glad to say!
And it’s not like the Olympics organizers have technophobia and are against modernization on principle. In fact, for the Tokyo Olympics, Japan was preparing autonomous shuttle buses for transporting the athletes and for the spectators, robot assistants. The shuttle buses might have run around with joy but I feel bad for those lonely robots in empty stadiums because the games took place amidst a pandemic with no spectators. I hope that the robot were at least (re-)programmed to sit down and play a game of Candy Crush™ to pass the boredom.
Anyway, I hope that my suggestions will be well received by IOC. Maybe making the games more relevant to the 21st century will help draw more audiences (barring any more pandemics, of course) and make the whole affair a bit more profitable and not an “economic disaster” as the whole Olympics thing has been dubbed in recent years.
So, how soon can I expect to watch the athletes fiercely competing in Touch? Not Paris 2024! That’s already here. Maybe LA28? Please don’t let it be at Brisbane 2032! By then, the touchscreens might have become completely obsolete and I will have to start from scratch. Plus, I have already gotten some Touch merchandise printed and it will be a huge personal financial loss.