Smaller

The Olympics used to be a slab of TV content. The internet has ground the Games into social media moments.

Things change. When I was a kid, the Summer Olympics were an iconic, quadrennial opportunity to rewatch the moon landing. Another chance to beat the Russians, this time in the medal count. But despite still commanding huge audiences, the five rings feel like a shadow of their former selves.

The Olympics have lost much of what made them the paramount sporting event. The key to an aspirational/luxury brand is the illusion of scarcity, and the Olympics feel less scarce. You no longer have to wait four years, now that the Summer and Winter Games alternate every two years. In 21 months, Comcast will begin marketing the Winter Games in Cortina d’Ampezzo (awesome name). A brand based on scarcity has effectively doubled its supply.

Also, while likely unavoidable, the presence of professionals in almost every sport has diluted the brand and the authenticity amateur athletes brought. The youth-focused events added in recent years, including skateboarding and BMX freestyle, cool as they are, don’t have the mystique of classic Olympic sports such as track and field. It feels as if the Olympics, like the rest of us, are desperately trying to look younger. To be fair, the Games have a history of adding and dropping new and/or weird sports going back to the first modern event in 1896. Firefighting, ballooning, and lifesaving were events in the early days.

Finally, the good guys vs. bad guys rush inspired by the Cold War has faded, and not just for us Americans. Athletes and fans are still proud to represent their countries, of course, but the nationalism seems less ferocious. The whole thing feels … smaller.

It’s a Business

Just before the start of the games, the International Olympic Committee said it was on track to hit its target of $1.2 billion in corporate sponsorships — the IOC says about 30% of its revenue comes from sponsorships; the rest comes from TV rights and licensing. LVMH paid about $163 million to be what the company calls a “creative partner.”

Watching the opening ceremony, two things struck me:

First, Paris isn’t a city, it’s the premier backdrop for any person/place/event trying to create a sense of elegance, sophistication, and exclusivity. The Olympics is the gangster travel ad for the host city, and no tourist destination is an easier sell than Paris.

The second thing: I am a Celine Dion fan.

I’d always dismissed her out of hand, but she gave what may be the performance of 2024. I just read that last sentence and realized I have officially become a senior citizen. Anyway, it was impossible to see her performing solo under the Eiffel Tower, despite the neurological problems that have derailed her career, without thinking of another Olympics moment, a Parkinson’s-wracked Muhammad Ali lighting the cauldron at the 1996 Atlanta Games.

Big Small Screens

The Olympics are — and always have been — about big, emotional moments. What’s changing is how we watch them. The TV audience has been shrinking for years. The opening ceremony this year brought a U.S. audience of 28.6 million viewers to NBC and its Peacock streaming service. That was significantly more than the 17.9 million who watched the Covid-hobbled 2020 Tokyo opening ceremony, but a steep drop from the peak 40.7 million who watched the London opening in 2012.

NBC paid $7.65 billion in 2014 for broadcast rights through 2032, and, looking at the TV viewership numbers, the IOC is on the better end of the deal. NBC, however, claims it booked $1.2 billion in Olympic ad revenue before the games and says it believes Paris will set a new ad revenue record.

A big engine of that ad revenue is streaming and other online distribution. While the overall viewership numbers are down, the digital share of Olympic viewership is up. NBC is using the Games to jumpstart Peacock, an also-ran in the streaming wars (33 million subscribers vs. Netflix’s 277 million). For the first time, Peacock plans to stream all 329 medal events — 5,000 hours worth of content — live. Streaming coverage of previous games was clunky.

NBC also wants to lock in a piece of the action on other digital platforms, specifically social media it doesn’t own. For the Paris Games, NBC has done digital partnership deals with Meta, Overtime, Roblox, Snapchat, YouTube, and TikTok, with which it is producing a daily one-hour TikTok Live show, Spotlight on Paris.

On its own, the network itself doesn’t seem to add much value. Watching the Games on linear (broadcast) TV is frustrating. Somebody else is deciding what you’re going to watch — a producer decides you’re going to see race-walking instead of surfing. On Peacock, you can be your own producer.

This year the technology caught up with the content. The shift toward streaming has cultivated more engaged audiences. Viewers actively choosing what and when to watch has led to greater engagement and more targeted advertising opportunities. I’d rather sit on the couch, let someone else decide, complain about it, and be pelted by ads about my restless legs or opioid-induced constipation. But I digress.

Linear TV used to be the entire story; now it’s just one of three ways to watch — broadcast, streaming, and social media. Increasingly, it’s becoming less of a distribution channel and more of a content generator that feeds video to the insatiable streaming and social media platforms.

Not One Story

Every sports organization on the planet from Formula 1 to the National Football League has turned its attention to digital distribution. The Olympics, though, may be better suited to the internet than any other sporting event. Unlike the SuperBowl or the World Cup Final, the Olympics is not an event people will watch from beginning to end. It is instead a huge collection of little stories, human moments.

We’ve watched best friends (Sarah Bacon and Kassidy Cook) win a medal in synchronized diving and Simon Biles take flight. We’ve watched the emotional TikTok of Filipino weightlifter Hidilyn Diaz winning her country’s first-ever gold medal. (Actually, this is from the 2020 Games, but never mind — go watch it.)

Other Paris moments: Ukrainian fencer Olga Kharlan dedicating her bronze medal to her country’s servicemen and women; French swimmer Léon Marchand crushing the competition in front of a home crowd; Brazilian surfer Gabriel Medina seeming to walk on air after an epic wave off Tahiti. The good-natured trash talk between members of the U.S. table tennis team and basketball star Anthony Edwards (Edwards refused to believe he wouldn’t win a single point) has been shared nearly 16 million times on X.

I was, no joke, the worst D-1 athlete in UCLA’s history (crew). However, several friends went to the Olympics. These athletes put their life on hold to represent their country at the Games and — outside the romance sports — made huge sacrifices economically to be the best in the world, at something, at that moment. Greatness is in the agency of others, and at the Olympics athletes are competing for something bigger: national pride.

The Olympics do feel smaller than in the 1980s. It may be because we are consuming them now in smaller bites. Some of what made them feel important in the past — particularly the intense us vs. them nationalism of the Reagan era — is gone.

What is still there is the primal drive to compete and the hunger to feel something. In a world increasingly run by old people, it’s inspiring to watch young people pursue excellence for the sake of something bigger than themselves: one another and their countries.

I like Celine Dion, and the Olympics.

Life is so rich,

 

P.S. Every Wednesday on the Prof G Pod I answer listener questions. This week: Is the U.S. College Price Tag Still Worth It? and Why You Should Say Yes More Often. Listen on Apple or Spotify.

 

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