We’re not here to play tiddly winks!
Top Three @ The Paris 2024 Olympics
24th July 2024 - Part 2
This is the second instalment, in a series of indeterminate length:
We’re not here to play tiddly winks!
More coming soon!
This memorable exclamation was immortalised by former All Black captain Tana Umaga during the 2003 Super 12 semifinal (back in the days when Super Rugby used to be named after the number of teams competing). He was frustrated after being penalised by Australia referee Stewart Marshall for tackling an opposition player without the ball (which, to be clear, is against the rules of rugby, so correctly a penalty offence). I think it perfectly captures the essence of Paris 2024.
The Olympic Games is an eclectic melange of different sports. Sadly tiddly winks is still not one of them - although I wouldn’t be surprised to discover it’s on the list for consideration.
At Paris 2024 there are 32 sports, comprising 45 disciplines and 329 separate events. Gymnastics is a sport, rhythmic gymnastics is a discipline, volleyball is a sport, beach volleyball is a discipline etc. That distinction seems fluid to me - for example, 3x3 basketball and basketball are listed as separate disciplines but 100m, 10,000m and shot put are all just included under the single athletics umbrella. Let’s just cope with that for now.
There are currently 28 “core” summer Olympic sports. The most recent additions to that list were golf and rugby sevens in 2016. There are no longer “demonstration” sports - the last of those was Wushu in Beijing in 2008 - but the host city has the opportunity to add “additional” sports for a specific Games. At Paris 2024 those are breakdancing, skateboarding, surfing and sports climbing.1
By the time the next Olympics rolls around in Los Angeles 2028 the number of “core” sports will have increased to 31 (in 2022 the International Olympic Committee voted to add skateboarding, surfing and sports climbing permanently as “core” sports - breakdancing missed out) and cricket and lacrosse are “additional” sports.2
Confused yet? If so, I’m not at all surprised.
Here’s another way of breaking this down, which might make more sense to the casual fan. We can broadly combine the Olympic sports under thirteen categories (honestly, I’ve tried to make this simpler - it’s just not)…
Athletics - the canonical Olympic sports: running, jumping and throwing etc.
Water Sports - when all you need is togs and a pool: swimming (in a pool or in open water) and diving. Artistic swimming is also included here (add a peg for the nose to the equipment list).
Gymnastics - all the things you might do in a gymnasium: artistic (what most people would count as gymnastics - vaulting and tumbling etc), rhythmic or bouncing on a trampoline.
Ball Sports - all of the sports that need multiple people and some kind of ball + net/hoop/goal: football, basketball (both kinds), volleyball (both kinds), handball, hockey, rugby. Golf and water polo are also included here (the latter is a grey area - could also be a water sport).
Shooting Sports - firing things at a target: either arrows (archery) or bullets (shooting).
Racquet Sports - when you have a ball, something to hit it with and a net to hit it over: tennis, badminton, and table tennis (humour me here).
Fighting Sports - boxing, fencing, judo, taekwondo, and wrestling.
Strength sports - basically weightlifting.3
Urban Sports - skateboarding, breaking (I’m not sure when the name changed from breakdancing, but ¯\(ツ)/¯), rock climbing.
Sport in Boats - or other things that float: sailing, canoeing (on flat water or in a fake rapid, officially “slalom and sprint”), rowing, and surfing
Sport on Bikes - cycling (on a road or on a track), BMX (racing + freestyle), and mountain biking.
Sport on Horses - as the name suggests!
Multi-sport - when just one sport isn’t enough: it could be three (the triathlon4) or five (aka the modern pentathlon - which begs the question: what’s the ancient pentathlon?).5
When we look at it all this way the shape of the Olympic Games is a bit more visible. Athletics and Water Sports between them account for 97 of the 329 gold medals (about 30% of the total). Add in Fighting Sports and that increases to 168 (just under 50%).
Meanwhile athletes from New Zealand have a bias towards Sport in Boats (40 of the 329 gold medals, or 12%) and Ball Sports (16 gold medals, 5%). Interestingly those two categories account for 35 (66%) of the gold medals we’ve ever won.
There is a long tail.
Higher Faster Stronger
Let’s take a massive tangent and ask: what should be an Olympic sport?
Growing up, this question of what is and isn’t an appropriate Olympic discipline was the source of endless discussion in my family.6 Every sports fan has an opinion. If your preferred sport is already an Olympic discipline then you likely assume that is the natural order of things. If not, then it’s safe to assume that administrators are doing everything they can to lobby for inclusion. Even activities that many people are skeptical even count as sports at all would love to be on the list - looking at you e-sports and chess.
Ultimately the International Olympic Committee decides what is and isn’t included, and that makes it a complicated political process. If you follow the money, an important consideration is the potential for prime time ratings on NBC in the United States. And from a host city’s perspective the ability to sell tickets to spectators.
However, by adding more and more sports the Olympics have become so big that they risk collapsing under their own weight. The best evidence for this is that competition starts today - two days before the opening ceremony on Friday (we’ll be heading along later tonight to watch the first kiwis in action at the rugby sevens). It’s no longer possible to complete all of the Olympic events during the Olympics. Continuing to make the Games even bigger, while seemingly inevitable, seems self-defeating.
It’s not hard to think of new and different sports that could be added. But, what could be dropped? It think that’s a more interesting question. If we could design a slimmed down Olympic Games, what sporting-based criteria could we use to decide which sports make the cut?7
I think we could do much worse than just enforcing the IOC’s existing motto: Citius, Altius, Fortius, which is Latin for: Faster, Higher Stronger.8
To be more specific than that requires some harsh and no doubt controversial calls, but here are my five criteria…
1. Pinnacle
In my opinion, winning an Olympic gold medal should be the peak of an athlete’s career. So, the Olympic Games should be the most prestigious competition in the calendar for each sport that wants to be included.
A number of current sports don’t chin this bar. Football and rugby have their own World Cups (the sevens tonight will be at Stade de France, which was the venue for the Rugby World Cup final between the All Blacks and South Africa last year, for example). Tennis and golf both have four majors every year, and all of them are higher honours than an Olympic gold. For basketball, even their separate World Championships struggles to compete with the NBA + WNBA (just ask Steven Adams about that - he’s the best kiwi player, but chooses not to play for New Zealand).
2. Global
The thing that makes the Olympics unique is it’s a truly global event, attracting athletes from 200+ countries. Walking around Paris yesterday it was a delight to spot fans from Ecuador, Mongolia and Morocco amongst others. The best in the world can, and do, come from unexpected places (including, sometimes, New Zealand). With apologies to AFL, NFL and sumo wrestling, the Olympic Games should be focussed on sports that are played everywhere.
Current sports that don’t meet this criterion include handball, surfing, beach volleyball and water polo.
3. Objective
Let’s get even more brutal…
The motto is Faster, Higher, Stronger. However so many current Olympic events are decided by artistic merit.9 As soon as there are subjective judgements involved, that requires human judges to pick the winners. As we’ve seen over and over again, judges are fallible and sometimes biased.
A slimmed down Olympics could strip back to events where the winners could be determined by objective results (i.e. performances that can be timed or measured) not by human assessment.
Current sports that don’t meet this criterion include gymnastics, diving, artistic swimming and freestyle BMX (and in the Winter Olympics halfpipe and big air - two recent gold medal events for NZ athletes).
4. Unconstrained
The fastest way to swim is call “the forward crawl”. This is the technique used by every competitor in the “freestyle” races. And yet at the Olympics there are separate races for different strokes: backstroke, breaststroke, and butterfly. Why? How come running backwards a joke on the internet while swimming backwards is an Olympic event? There are not separate athletics events for hopping or skipping, or three-legged running. That doesn’t make any sense.
And before track and field athletes start getting smug, explain the logic behind the triple jump and the hurdles races and the 3000m steeplechase. If we wanted human show jumping then we should include actual human show jumping as an Olympic event. And don’t get me started on race walking. For some reason race walking is only ever long distance. I'd like to see walking sprints: 100m, 200m etc. That would be hilarious!
Ditto all of the sports that are split out into weight divisions. In the history of athletics, only a small group of people have ever run sub-27 mins for the 10,000m, and I believe Chris Solinsky, is still the only one of those who was heavier than 65kg at the time (he ran 26:59.6 in May 2010 when he weighed 165lb or 74.84kg). Despite that, we don’t have separate heavyweight and middleweight athletics events. Why are there separate weight classes in boxing, weightlifting, taekowndo, wrestling and judo (and even in a couple of specific rowing events), but not in athletics? That doesn’t seem fair.
Every event at the Olympics should be the premier version of that sport.
In addition to swimming, athletics and the fighting sports listed above, current sports that don’t meet this criteria include rugby, mens football (which is mostly an under-23 competition), 3x3 basketball and beach volleyball.
5. Unassisted
Last but not least, sports at the Olympics should be contested between athletes.
We generally (and quite correctly) have a very dim view of athletes who gain an advantage by taking performance enhancing drugs. But there are many sports where performance enhancing equipment makes just as big a difference - be it a horse, or a bike or a boat.
This limits the potential participation to just those athletes and countries who can afford to make those investments. This possibly explains why African countries are dominant on the running track but more or less invisible on the cycling track, for example. It definitely explains why so many swimming world records were broken in the brief period where athletes were allowed to compete in full body polyurethane and neoprene skin suits.
Current sports that don’t meet this criterion include rowing, cycling, equestrian and sailing.
So, if we were to strictly enforce those five criteria what does that leave us with? I reckon the few events that still qualify would actually be a more interesting Olympic Games:
Let’s go through our thirteen categories:
Athletics - track and field in, but no triple jump or hurdles or walking, decathlon/heptathlon is also out.
Water sports - swimming is in, but all races are freestyle; artistic swimming is cut.
Gymnastics - all gone, at least until they find a way to be objective.
Ball Sports - volleyball (sans beach) is in; hockey is borderline.
Shooting Sports - archery is in (perhaps my bias, but seems more athletic than shooting).
Racket Sports - badminton is in, if we’re forced to pick from the current options; but squash or even pickleball are strong contenders to be added instead (let the bidding begin!)
Fighting Sports - fencing is in (the only current option with an objective scoring system).
Strength sports - surprising myself here, but “Stronger” is one of the three things specifically named in the motto, so weightlifting is in, but open-category only - no weight classes and no distinction between snatch and clean-and-jerk; or maybe tug-o-war is finally re-included?
Urban Sports - climbing is in (again, objective not subjective).
Sport in Boats - canoe racing is in, but needs to become a single boat class to eliminate technology; sailing (which is already a single boat class) and surfing don’t make it, mostly because they requires a specific location (evidenced by the fact that for Paris 2024 the sailing events will actually be in Marseille and the surfing is in Taihiti).
Sport on Bikes - likewise with cycling, if it can switch to standardised equipment - with that change we could re-include time trial on the road and pure speed events on the track (sprint and a reinstated individual pursuit,10 plus maybe a mixed team pursuit).
Sport on Horses - definitely no.
Multi-sport - all gone by virtue of horses and bikes (triathlon could come back in with standardised bikes - see above).
That would significantly cull the number of sports (from 32 to 10) and medals (from 329 to just over 100, by my rough count). Every event would be objective, unconstrained and unassisted. Every event would attract entries from all around the world. The winners could celebrate the highest achievement in their chosen sports. At the same time we would significantly nullify the technology arms race (although would need to remain vigilant about running shoes and togs). And, it would be a much cheaper event to host even in much smaller cities.
It will never happen, but it’s fun to imagine!
All of this hypothesising aside, here is the take-away from all of this for these Olympic Games about to start:
It’s a mistake to think of the Olympics as a single thing. There are 329 medal events, and each of them is discrete.11 The sports and disciplines that are and aren’t included are a bit random. We should celebrate and be inspired by all of the individuals and teams who make it to the top in their chosen event, whatever it is and wherever they come from.
Let’s keep that in mind when we start talking about medal tables … which is where we’ll pick this up next time.
Header Photo by Adi Goldstein on Unsplash
There have been some changes since Tokyo 2020: four weight classes have been dropped from weightlifting; in canoeing, two sprint events (including the K1 200m that Lisa Carrington has won at each of the previous three Olympics) have been replaced with two slalom events, keeping the overall total at 16; in sport climbing, the previous "combined" event has been divided into separate speed climbing and boulder and lead disciplines for each gender.
Actually T20 Cricket and Lacrosse Sixes. The ICC and World Lacrosse Federation obviously followed the playbook established by World Rugby when they got Rugby 7s included.
I reckon weightlifting is lucky to still be included at all, after multiple drug scandals. They have significantly reduced the number of medals from previous Olympics when separate medals were awarded for clean-and-jerk, snatch and combined.
In my (quite biased) opinion triathlon is the ultimate Olympic sport, not just because kiwi athletes have enjoyed repeated success, with Hayden Wilde who won the fourth medal in Tokyo 2020 racing again in Paris 2024. With the benefit of hindsight triathlon should probably have replaced modern pentathlon when it was first introduced in Sydney 2000. That’s a story for another post.
Or four (the individual medley in swimming), seven (the heptathlon), or ten (the decathlon). Arguably you could also count the equestrian eventing as a multi-sport - dressage and show jumping are separate Olympic events, but cross country, for some reason, isn’t.
For context, my mother and brother were both competitive runners in their day, so squarely in the Athletics-is-the-only-real-sport camp
This wouldn’t be unprecedented. The only sports that have been contested at every modern Olympics are athletics, cycling, fencing, gymnastics and swimming. There is a long list of sports that have previously featured in the Olympics but are no longer - including tug-o-war and architecture (more on the Olympic design heritage in a future post, maybe).
In 2021 the International Olympic Committee approved a change in the Olympic motto that “recognises the unifying power of sport and the importance of solidarity”. The change adds the word “together” after an em dash to “Faster, Higher, Stronger”. So, combined, the new Olympic motto is now “Citius, Altius, Fortius – Communiter”.
The individual pursuit was dropped from the Olympic cycling programme after Beijing 2008. Sarah Ulmer won the gold at Barcelona 1992. Alison Shanks finished fourth in Beijing, but was the reigning world champion in the event at the time of the London 2012 Olympics and would have been favourite to win if the event was included then.
The one exception are the individual eventing events in equestrian, which are awarded to the same athletes who compete concurrently in the teams event. That seems a nonsense - for example, imagine if the most prolific try scorer in the rugby sevens was also awarded a separate medal.
Fantastic Rowan. I hope you’re there!