There's always a debate at the Olympics about whether it's too big, and whether some of the old sports should be dropped, and whether some more of the big, globally-popular sports should be included. Rugby and golf are coming next time. Baseball sometimes gets in. On the other hand, some of the smaller, quainter sports probably wouldn't exist without the Olympics. When was the last time you heard about the Modern Pentathlon in any other context?
I differ from many in that I'd get rid of the big popular sports. See, the Olympics are like Lollapalooza: it started with a bunch of little attractions that don't normally get recognition, but when banded together can generate a lot of interest. But then it gets more and more popular, and the bigger attractions want to take part. So you're adding in basketball or soccer or Metallica. But that makes the little attractions start to seem trivial and irrelevant, and the focus is on the big attractions. But they seem redundant, since they already get a lot of attention anyway. Olympic tennis? Didn't we just have Wimbledon? Didn't Pearl Jam just tour last year?
I'm not asking to turn the Olympics into some wild freak show of alternative athletics: no one wants to find out what the sporting equivalent of Goth subculture would look like. I'm just saying that if everyone on Earth is going to spend two weeks every four years (that's 1% of our lives) immersed in sports, it's refreshing when they're not the same old sports we're semi-immersed in the rest of the time.
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