Tokyo Olympics: more obscure sports, please

Well, the Olympics are in full swing, and so far anyway the prophets of doom look a bit silly, almost like those other prophets who from time to time gather their followers on a mountain top in expectation of the End of the World. Even in the absence of spectators and in defiance of other restrictions and Covid itself, the Tokyo Olympics seem to be doing just fine.

Actually my first sentence isn’t quite accurate. The Games aren’t yet in full swing. For hundreds of millions, the Olympic Games are the athletics, and the athletics are not yet underway. No doubt there is some exaggeration in identifying the Games with athletics, but it’s a pardonable exaggeration. From the days of Ancient Greece, running, throwing and jumping have been the heart of the Games.

Now of course there are more events or disciplines than most of us could number. For minority sports, inclusion in the Olympics is welcome and important. The Games are the only time when such sports, for example, gymnastics, weight-lifting, skateboarding, taekwondo and archery, attract worldwide attention. So their inclusion in the Olympics may be judged a good thing.

But, as the Games get bigger and bigger and bigger, it’s time to question the inclusion of some popular sports: football, tennis, golf, rugby union for example. Each of these fails what seems to me an important test. Do the Olympics represent the pinnacle of achievement for competitors?

The answer is obvious: no, it doesn’t. Football has its World Cup. It also has regional competitions – the Euros, Latin America’s Copa Americano, the African Nations Cup – all of which are more highly valued than the Olympics. The inclusion of football made some sense when the Games were still amateur. Then it might be claimed that an Olympic team was composed of a country’s best amateur footballers. But nobody can pretend now that Olympic football features the best footballers in the world. Few are even sure on what basis teams are selected. The one thing we know is that they aren’t the cream.

Some of the best golfers and tennis players are evidently happy and proud to be part of their nation’s Olympic team. But a gold medal in the Olympics can’t be said to carry the prestige of winning the Open Championship or the Masters at Augusta, Wimbledon or Roland Garros. Likewise the rugby union seven-a-sides in the Olympics scarcely attract 10 per cent of the attention devoted to Rugby’s World Cup in Japan two years ago. Moreover, the abbreviated seven-a-side game already has its own world championship. It doesn’t need the Olympics and the Olympics doesn’t need it. The suggestion that cricket, perhaps in the T20 form, should become an Olympic sport seems to me, as a cricket fan, manifestly absurd. Cricket in its various formats is already well supplied with world cups.

There are exceptions. Boxing is evidently one. There are, after all, significant differences between the rules and format of Olympic boxing and the professional game. Olympic boxing still belongs to the old amateur conception of the sport. Teams are drawn from associations which remain at least nominally amateur, and bouts are limited to three rounds. Medal winners may often see the Olympics as a stepping stone towards a professional career, as for instance Anthony Joshua who won Olympic gold at the London games in 2012 has done, but the distinction between Olympic and professional boxing is sufficiently clear to justify the sport’s continued inclusion in the Games.

Another good test for inclusion is this: how much attention does a sport attract from the wider public? If, as a minority sport, the answer is “not a lot”, that’s a good reason for its inclusion. So, for instance, it would make more sense to have squash which isn’t an Olympic sport in the Games, than tennis which currently is.

These are mutterings while we switch channels, often watching and sometimes being entranced by sports we previously knew little or indeed nothing about, while we wait for the real heart of the Games to beat when the athletics get underway in the stadium. Meanwhile, we tot up the medals in a spirit that departs quite some way from the time-honoured assertion that the important thing is not winning, but taking part. This itself is a far cry from the ancient Olympics when, as far as we can tell, winning was what really mattered – just as it does to the papers and other media today.