Behold the giant feast. Courses upon courses. Over the past 17 days this has been a city engorged, its every nook and crevice stuffed with sport, to the point where they had to parcel some of it off to the outskirts and even wrap some of it up in a doggy bag and send it to Tahiti.
Are we not sated? As we stagger down the boulevards with a toothpick and a smug burp, trying not to think of the indigestion of Monday morning, the memory of Paris 2024 remains fresh and pristine. This remains the greatest sporting event on Earth, having weathered terrorism, plague, Nazis and the 1904 marathon, when several competitors were chased off the route by dogs and the man who finished first turned out to have had a ride in a car.
As with any lavish meal, the body neatly separates it into the nourishment it needs and the excess matter it does not. The Olympics, to put it a little indelicately, needs to undergo a similar process. There are 48 disciplines across 32 sports at the modern Olympics, if you include all the isotopic variants such as BMX freestyle and rhythmic gymnastics. This is a rise of 41% since the Barcelona Games of 1992, 20% since London 2012. How much is too much?
For successive Games organisers, there is no reasonable answer to this question. This is a beast that must always be fed, must always be devouring and expanding, eating up more of its host cities and more of its citizens’ tax revenues. Which, if you think about it, feels just a little grotesque. Imagine casting an eye over the modern Olympics, in all its greed and grandeur and corruption and waste, and deciding that what it really needs is to become bigger.
But this is what is happening.
The Los Angeles Games of 2028 will feature five new sports: baseball/softball, cricket, flag football, lacrosse and squash. In the other direction, breaking and perhaps boxing are poised to make way. But we can do better than this. This patient needs to go on a diet before it does itself some serious harm.
There are tough decisions to be made. Perhaps your favourite sport does not make the cut. Fortunately, your correspondent does not get a seat on the IOC executive board. But consider, too, that thinning out the programme will provide more room to the sports that remain, giving their athletes a brighter spotlight, rather than a fleeting nine minutes of fame before everyone’s attention turns to the next thing. Less really can be more.
Before we begin, a few ground rules. Sports that appeal to the widest possible global base should be prioritised. Plus points for sports that can be staged in cities. And plus points for what I am – with a high degree of subjectivity – describing as the “wow factor”, sports that work on social media as well as they do in the stadium, sports that push the boundaries of the body over sports that consist largely of a bunch of guys slowly becoming sweatier.
So athletics stays. Gymnastics, cycling, basketball, BMX, skateboarding and climbing make the cut on all the above criteria. Wrestling and weightlifting are simple, primal tests of the body. Judo, boxing and taekwondo are the purest of the combat sports. Handball, table tennis and badminton are classic hand-eye coordination sports with low bars to entry. Diving, canoeing and beach volleyball all score high on the “wow factor”. Shooting, fencing and hockey are hanging on by a thread. But among the rest there is plenty of low-hanging fruit.
Sailing
How many of you own a boat? How many of you could get access to a boat and – checks notes – a sea to sail it in? Of all the many anachronisms at the modern Olympics, sailing is perhaps the most conspicuous of all: a continuing sop to super-rich men who founded the Games and still just really love yachts, basically inaccessible to most of the countries in the world, even the ones with a viable coastline.
But socio-demographics is actually not the biggest issue here. For an event whose defining motif is bringing people together in a place to celebrate sport, sailing is basically extraneous to the whole thing: marooned hundreds of miles away in some well-heeled harbour, basically unwatchable as a spectator sport, liable to be postponed if there is either no wind or too much wind, and with a set of penalty rules indecipherable to all but the most avid boat people, which as we’ve established, you are almost certainly not.
Archery
No disrespect to the immense levels of skill, concentration and physical discipline involved here. But this is a sport with no discernible identity. It’s a homage to medieval military combat reduced to the level of holiday-camp activity, an endlessly repeatable skill taking place at a frankly pre-digital pace. There is perhaps a case for moving targets, which was essentially the point of archery in the first place. But if we’re going to have an arrows sport in the Olympics, there’s frankly only one choice. Luke Littler for LA 2028.
Surfing
Surfing is great. Surfing is spectacular. Surfing is hard and dangerous. But it runs into the same problem as sailing: what is the point of an Olympic sport you have to stage away from the Olympics? This was a sport that was popular and thriving before it achieved Olympic status, albeit only in the few places in the world where you can do it properly. It was a nice idea, but you would struggle to argue it was worth the trouble and compromises it entailed. A brilliant sport. Just not an Olympic sport.
Anything with a horse
From the Olympic charter: “Sports, disciplines or events in which performance depends essentially on mechanical propulsion are not acceptable.” This is the basis upon which motorsports continue to be banned from the Games. So, a question: what does it really matter if the form of mechanical propulsion has ears, a tail and a silly name?
You don’t even have to be into animal welfare or appalled by the Charlotte Dujardin affair to object to the existence of equestrian sports (in the Olympics). Again, let’s set aside the level of expertise and skill involved here. Why a horse, and not a dog, or a bear, or a car? And don’t give me tradition. Riding on elephants is traditional. Making bears dance is traditional. But there’s a lot of high-net-worth individuals interested in it, and the blue-chip brands who want their money, so somehow everyone has to maintain the pretence that this is an actual thing.
You know Valegro, the horse Dujardin rode to double Olympic gold in 2012 and 2016? He was Dutch. Horses at the Olympics do not have to be from the country they are representing. You can just buy a well-bred gelding from some international breeder, ship him over and teach him to dance. If you’re a fan of equestrian sports, you have one argument in your favour here and it’s: “I really like horses.” It’s not great. But it’s all you’ve got.
3x3 basketball
Look, we’ve all had to play in a game where not quite enough people turned up. You play half-pitch football because you couldn’t get the numbers. A couple of your guys have to field for the opposition because they brought nine. Only in basketball is this makeshift exigency somehow elevated to the level of Olympic medals. Three is not enough for a game of basketball, by a factor of about 60%. An entirely unnecessary discipline, existing entirely for people somehow convinced proper basketball isn’t accessible enough.
Rowing
See: sailing. But also add a veneer of varsity superciliousness, the same eight countries winning everything and the visceral thrill of largely similar boats racing each other over the same distance in a straight line. I’m sure there are rowing people out there who can explain why we need separate fours and quad sculls events and why they need to host the whole thing on a lake miles away when the most famous boat race in the world takes place on a river in the middle of a city. One of those Olympic sports that exists largely because people in 1900 thought it was pretty neat.
Golf
Let’s be honest: this hasn’t really worked, has it? As heartwarming as it has been seeing Xander Schauffele and Scottie Scheffler fattening their trophy cabinets in front of politely applauding crowds, nothing about this sport screams “Olympics”. Of course the players love it, they love playing golf. But it’s a poor-value event for the land it takes up and its distance from the main show. Quite apart from the fact that its founding values – avarice, solitude, peace and quiet – are essentially anathema to everything the Olympics is. Can you imagine a golfer lighting the Olympic torch? And properly, not just with their cigarette lighter. Exactly.
Volleyball
This may be the most contentious one of all. Volleyball ticks many of the boxes of a classic Olympic sport: tradition, low bars to entry, city-based. But in a contracting Games, it is increasingly difficult to make the case there should be two separate disciplines, and – sorry – beach won. It’s picturesque, it’s outdoors, it’s hedonistic, it takes the skills of traditional volleyball and projects them in a more digestible format. There are probably one too many Olympic sports that give off the vibe of “provincial leisure centre at 6pm”. With regrets, volleyball gets the short straw.
Men’s football
With a caveat. You get the best players in the world to turn up, like they do in tennis, and you can stay. This is never going to happen and what we get is an unsatisfactory compromise – teams of under-23 unknowns with a meagre sprinkling of stardust – that ultimately satisfies nobody.
It fails for the same reasons all these start-up leagues founded by abundant petro-dollars fail – this is a sport that runs not just on star names but on star teams, collectives with a discernible identity, either through heritage or as the recognisable products of a national system. This is why women’s football remains a vital and valued part of the programme. But when one of your major talking points is whether Mohamed Elneny can show glimpses of his old Arsenal form, it’s fair to say you’ve missed an opportunity there.
Swimming
OK, not all the swimming. But pretty much all the bits that are just weird forms of swimming. No other sport allows participants to simply do it backwards and call it a separate event with separate medals. As impressive as Michael Phelps and Léon Marchand are, with their multiple medals in multiple disciplines, you do have to ask whether, if they can win multiple medals in multiple disciplines, those disciplines are all that different.
Swimming occupies far too much Games real estate, leading to the ludicrous scenario when Paris built two aquatics venues, one for swimming and one for all the rest of the pool sports. Keep the freestyle at its various distances. Keep one medley race to give Adam Peaty something to do at weekends. The rest, unfortunately, goes into the great Games intestine for ejection: an ugly and regrettable process, but one from which the body as a whole will emerge far healthier as a result.
