Air is Simone Biles’s best friend. It allows her to express herself in ways that land never can. When Biles is air-borne, the contortion of her body is limited only by her imagination. Her 4’8” frame can spin and twist, sway and fold almost at will. She dances in tandem with and in opposition to gravity with the kind of aesthetic perfection that makes her chosen sport seem more like an art. Watching Biles clinch another gold medal — this time in the women’s team gymnastics event at Paris 2024 — felt like watching a conjurer levitate into legend. It was the sort of performance that lingers in the mind long after it’s over, urging you to pore over replays (and tweets) to find a suitable explanation behind her genius.
One of my favourite habits as a sports fan is to read about momentous sporting achievements the morning after. But by the time I got around to locating what the world’s finest writers had to say about Biles’s brilliance, the Olympics news cycle had already moved on. To my dismay, the sports writer I love reading the most — Jonathan Liew from The Guardian — hadn’t penned a single line on Biles from Tuesday’s final. Instead, his most recent columns were on rowing, cycling and basketball, three Olympic sports I couldn’t care less about. In the larger landscape of the Olympics, Biles had been a showstopper for just a few minutes, before the bandwagon circled around other phenoms (and underdogs) in the rest of the 31 sports. The fact that Biles had defied biology and physics was acknowledged, processed and duly consigned to the pages of slapdash history. In the time it took me to type out this paragraph, the next Olympics headline act had already come and gone.
A blur of colours and emotions
Manu Bhaker and Sarabjot Singh pose with their bronze medals in Paris Getty Images
Increasingly, the Olympic Games are becoming to sports what Instagram is to content. Too many things are happening — most of which you have some to no idea of — but you can’t stop looking. There’s India’s first medal of 2024… is that Nita Ambani in a post that should’ve been about Manu Bhaker?… there go India’s hopes in tennis… Argentina are eliminated by France in men’s football… Katie Ledecky is insanely good… India takes one more fourth place… when did break-dancing become an Olympic sport… there’s Nita Ambani again…
Gradually, the Olympics have come to feel like a blur of colours and emotions, the brain unable to fully grasp one thing before another is presented for instant consumption. To make matters worse, there are sports like canoeing, equestrian, surfing and taekwondo (to name a few), where the rules can be pedantic to the extent of being pointless. Throw in work emails, no Swiggy deliveries (due to inclement weather), and the actual Instagram, and a sports fanatic like me is overwhelmed. So much so that after tempering my excitement to see Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic square off for possibly the last time at Roland Garros, the melee of the Olympics calendar made me forget when they were supposed to play. No wonder I switched to Stuart Broad explaining fast bowling on YouTube.
You might be better off flipping burgers at McDonald’s than risking life and limb in the French capital
In the modern era, the Olympics are as much about business as they are about sports Getty Images
Back in the days of ancient Greece, where the Olympics originated in an attempt to earn the favour of Zeus, the Games would often last for a maximum of four days. Athletes, especially males, would compete naked, honoured with a wreath for their excellence. Among the most hotly anticipated events were chariot racing and pankration (WWE without a script, basically). When the Romans tweaked the competition to suit their tastes, emperors would occasionally participate — for instance, Nero, who entered a chariot race, fell off his chariot and declared himself the winner!
In the modern era, though, the Olympics are not about rollicking fun or absurd humour. They are as much about business as they are about sports. Billions of dollars swirl around the Games, usually with minimal accountability.
Who is responsible for the dozens of new facilities that were built specifically for Rio 2016 but have been unused ever since? When was the last time the United Nations spoke about the mass displacement of locals that made Beijing 2008 possible? Going further back, will Canada ever host another Olympics after it took them three decades to pay off the dues for Montreal 1976? For every jubilant Parisian welcoming the “greatest show on earth” for the cameras, there are hundreds who have grumbled about feeling alienated in their own city. Moreover, for all its claims to go green, Paris 2024 is likely to present carbon footprint numbers (reportedly this autumn) in ways that boggle the mind even more than Biles’s athleticism.
Even for the athletes — without whom there would obviously be no Olympics — the return on investment during the Games is no certainty. As this video proves, unless you’re a sporting celebrity, you might be better off flipping burgers at McDonald’s than risking life and limb in the French capital.
There’s little scope to soak in success, even less to fathom failure
The Games are not so kind to those who miss out on glory Getty Images
From a logistical standpoint, packing more than 10,000 athletes (not to mention their entourages and tourists) into one of the world’s busiest cities for a fortnight doesn’t seem like common sense (I shudder at the thought of an Indian city earning the right to host anytime soon). Even if the disproportionate environmental and human costs are overlooked for the sake of argument, how much do the Olympic Games serve to consolidate sports that don’t command global attention on their own? When was the last time you sat through a shooting competition that wasn’t at the Olympics? Do you wait with bated breath for track and field events across the rest of the year? Would you even have heard of Neeraj Chopra had he missed out on a medal in Tokyo?
The overnight stars who are plastered across public consciousness by the Olympics constitute the one percenters, those with the right combination of talent, tenacity and luck to prevail on the grandest stage. But to those who miss out on glory, sometimes by a matter of inches, the Games are not so kind. Their best hope is to soldier on for another four years until they can be thrust into the rarefied limelight again. It is this outsized obsession with the Olympics that bothers me, wherein one extravaganza can swallow entire sports whole, leaving few incentives for meaningful development in areas that don’t share a direct relationship with the Games.
However, as a sports fan, my biggest complaint against the Olympics is that they don’t reward dedicated fandom. Unlike other quadrennial tournaments such as the World Cups, where fans reach the culmination of years of ecstasy and agony by way of supporting their favourite teams and/or sportspersons, the Olympics largely make fans out of spectators. A name you hadn’t heard a day ago becomes the subject of countless social media stories. There’s little scope to soak in success, even less to fathom failure. There are no narratives to gnaw at your soul, no bandwidth to stay immersed in the journey of one man or one woman. For all their glamour and grandeur, the Olympics tend to ignore the fact that when it comes to sports, meaning, unlike medals, cannot be mass-produced.