Why Did I Like The Olympics This Time?

I’ve never been a huge Olympics guy. I would tune in and out here and there, enjoy a race or two or a basketball game, but I could never really get into it. I got bored with the soft-focus profiles of athletes who overcame whatever obstacles, fed up with NBC’s constant shenanigans with back-in-the-day tape delay or time differences or whatever, or just couldn’t get into the various sports whose nebulous rules certainly don’t lend themselves to once-every-four-years viewing.

But not this year!

This year, for some reason, I was super into the Olympics. I watched the hell out of them! Off the top of my head, I watched at least some of the following sports: Basketball (lots), gymnastics, judo, track and field (lots), water polo, soccer, tennis, wrestling, fencing, cycling, and I dunno probably a few more. It was a lot of fun.

So… why? Over the course of the past two weeks, I have been wondering this a lot; why was I drawn to this particular version of the Olympics when I more or less never have been before?

One answer that has been lauded ad nauseum already is NBC’s and Peacock’s complete retooling of its coverage. Gold Zone, the streaming channel that gleefully jumped around from event to event to show medals being won, was a revelation; the ability to simply toggle back to find any event’s stream in full was equally important. For the first time that I can remember, at least, it felt like watching sports one wanted to watch and just absorbing the overall waterfall of events and medals was feasible and enjoyable.

It has also been suggested in various corners that these Olympics just happened to fall at a perfect time, at least in the U.S. if not elsewhere. When much of the media treats the never-ending election cycle as a sport in itself, and up until just a few weeks ago the country was locked in a déjà vu campaign that had millions just wishing it would end. Or at least change: the change, from Biden to Harris and then Walz as well, coincided more or less with the onset of the Olympics. It’s not impossible that the general shift from dour to joyful just sort of meshed well with the tenor of the international competition, where a random fencing match at 2 p.m. on a Tuesday ends with some of the purest expressions of triumph and happiness imaginable.

We’re done with exhausted and grim; let’s do happy for a few weeks.

And if we’re in the market for nebulous, impossible-to-disprove reasons, another: we were due for some sort of collective experience like this. The last Summer Olympics, held in Tokyo in 2021 after a year of delay, felt more like a gasp at fresh air after the pandemic than a joyful emergence into the sun. The Winter Olympics in 2022 took place in Beijing, the first city to host both seasons’ versions and far from a winter wonderland; it too suffered under the stink of Covid (not to say that these 2024 games were free of it, of course; many athletes got sick, and some high-profile competitions were marred by some irresponsible decisions), not to mention the human rights catastrophes around its edges. Maybe the world was ready to do a fun thing together for a change.

In the end, who knows. I don’t think I’m an outlier, given the glowing write-ups the coverage, the sports themselves, all of it has received over Paris’s run. And maybe next time I’ll go right back to flipping the television on for a few minutes before wandering off to do something else; but for these couple of weeks, whether through boredom or existential dread or desire for collective connection, I became Huge Olympics Guy, and loved it.