Why I Hate Sports But Love the Olympics

Many women love sports, but I am not one of them. I don’t want to play sports, and I certainly don’t want to watch them. And yet, I will be enthusiastically following the Paris 2024 Olympic Games this summer.

Every couple of years, I get excited about the Olympics, a fervor that surprises the men in my life, the ones I automatically tune out when they start talking about the Yankees or Real Madrid. You won’t make me like the NBA, but I might wake up early to watch the semifinals of the women’s three-meter diving event. NBC calls the Olympics one of only two major sporting events that consistently draws more women than men. The U.S. Olympic audience is roughly 55 percent female and 45 percent male, the exact opposite of the gender split at the Super Bowl.

If so many women watch the Olympics, it’s probably because so many of them participate. The Paris 2024 Summer Games are being touted as the first to achieve gender parity. That’s a huge step forward, especially when compared to the very first Olympics. In ancient Greece, women were not allowed to cross the Alpheus River to Olympia, even to watch the Games, for fear of seeing naked male athletes competing. Legend has it that a daughter of Diagoras of Rhodes—whether Pherenice or Kallipatere is unclear—was caught disguising herself as a man to sneak into the ring. Banned from competing, she had been training her son, a boxer, and when he won a match, she couldn’t contain her excitement. By jumping over the barrier that separated her from the ring, she inadvertently revealed her femininity. Authorities exempted her from the punishment of being thrown off a high cliff because she pleaded that she was only supporting the men in her life: her father, brothers and son, all Olympic athletes.

More than two millennia later, some attitudes have endured. In 1894, when Baron Pierre de Coubertin presented his idea to revive the ancient Olympic Games, he spoke of a grand vision of inclusion in terms of class and nationality, but not gender. No women competed in the first Olympics in Athens in 1896; in Mexico City in 1968, only one in seven athletes was female. Yet most of the women who made sports history in the first half of the 20th century did so at the Olympics. Alice Coachman, for example, a black woman from Georgia, won a gold medal in the high jump in London in 1948 and the congratulations of President Harry Truman at the White House. The only major women’s sports league to emerge in the United States before 1950 was the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League in 1946, and that was only because the war kept aspiring athletes busy.

When women began competing in sports leagues, media attention didn’t follow. The University of Southern California’s Center for Feminist Research tracked gender asymmetries in sports coverage on ESPN and network news channels from 1989 to 2019. Little changed. Even last year, as Caitlin Clark’s rise sparked unprecedented interest in women’s basketball, another report found that women’s athletics accounted for just 15 percent of all sports coverage.

Alex Kirshner: Caitlin Clark is just the beginning

Except at the Olympics. Since the London Games in 2012, female athletes have more Women get more airtime than men. At the 2020 Tokyo Games (held in 2021 due to the pandemic), NBC gave 58% of the screen time to women in prime time, according to an article in the International Journal of Sports Communication.

Call it the representation theory of why women love the Olympics: Put women on TV and the female audience will watch. But that explanation only goes so far. Anti-sports nerds like me don’t care about non-Olympic sports, regardless of the gender of the participants. To me, the WNBA has no more appeal than the NBA. So what do I see in the Olympics?

First of all, I must say that I see pomp and beautiful outfits. Let us recall that the Olympic Games are one of the two NBC’s major sporting events attract more female viewers than male viewers. The other is the Kentucky Derby, a convention of ostentatious hats that takes place on the sidelines of a horse race. I can’t be the only one watching the Olympics, partly to see what Stella McCartney has designed for the British team and to admire the spectacle of the equestrian show at Versailles.

Second, I see a competition that looks more like the kind in which women feel comfortable and thrive. (I’ve already begun to overgeneralize about half the human species, so let me continue.) Women tend to do better in school than men, and the Olympics—with their elitism, their emphasis on classical Greek origins, and their stifling, corrupt bureaucracy—have a lot in common with academia. In many of the Olympic flagship events, such as figure skating, athletes literally earn grades. Polls also show that women are more supportive of multilateral organizations than men, and the International Olympic Committee is sort of the United Nations of sports. Women also visit museums and art galleries more than men, according to visitor data. The Olympics offer a highly curated, synthetic—you might say—view of the world. exposure—of every sport imaginable.

Ultimately, I see an idea of sporting success that has more to do with excellence than with dominating an opponent.

When people say they like watching sports, they are usually referring to sports involving balls, like soccer.ballbasketballBall sports (or, in the case of hockey, puck sports, which is close enough) are zero-sum sports. You can’t play football or tennis without an opponent, and you can only succeed at their expense, not just by outplaying them, but by making them fail. They are not just sports, they are also sports Games:socially constructed competitions which produce winners and losers – a quality that excites crowds – and which are based on ultimately arbitrary rules.

From the January/February 2014 issue: The Accidental Spectator’s Guide to Improving Sports

During the Olympic season, the ball sports that usually monopolize the media spotlight fade into the background. The Olympics may be called the Games, but what sets them apart is that they feature sports that are not really games: artistic expressions like gymnastics and figure skating, races like track and field and swimming—sports that are not just sports but survival skills or dances. Soccer and volleyball are “played,” but running, swimming, or skiing are not played; they simply run, swim, or ski. These activities do not present a problem to be solved or an opponent to be defeated, but rather a test of the human body’s capabilities.City, altius, fortius“It’s the Olympic slogan: ‘Faster, higher, stronger.'”

What attracts me, an otherwise sport-averse woman, to the Olympics is the quest for perfection that is not inherently competitive. Sure, Olympic athletes try to win. Not everyone wins a medal. But runners, swimmers and others are not connected to their opponents in the same way that ball players are. Anita DeFrantz, an American rowing bronze medalist at the 1976 Montreal Olympics, told me that her coach always told the team to forget about the boats they were racing against and keep their eyes fixed on the lane. This proved difficult because she wanted to win, and indeed, she sometimes couldn’t help but glance at the other boats during the competition. But she was at her best when she followed her coach’s advice and focused on the action itself. “It’s the thrill of the boat when it’s at its top speed, it’s rolling in the water and you can hear the bubbles going down,” she said. “And when it’s going that fast, there’s nothing like it.”

DeFrantz dedicated her life to sports, not only as an athlete but also as a member of the International Olympic Committee, which she joined in 1986, becoming the first black person and the first woman to do so. She wrote a memoir titled My Olympic Life. But DeFrantz doesn’t seem interested in sports other than the Olympic niche. When I asked her if she followed any ball sports, she diplomatically replied that she supported all the professional teams in Los Angeles, where she lives, but didn’t have time to follow them. I found her indifference inspiring. Finally: an athlete even I can admire.

When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for your support Atlantic.