Imagine someone offered you a deal. They have the ability to make a lot of money. They have all the contacts, but none of the required resources. They claim that, if you help them make a few small payments, they can profit immensely, and they’ll give you half the earned cash. It sounds great, right?
But it’s a scam. It’s actually going to cost you just over £4 billion, a debt that you’ll be paying off for years. You’ll never see the profits. I’m not talking about the claims of an alleged Nigerian monarch or a pyramid scheme to rival those of Pharaoh Ramses. No. I’m actually talking about the Olympics.
Since 1896, the Olympics have been a fond feature of the modern world. But they might soon disappear from that world. But why?
First, how do the Olympics work? The IOC (International Olympic Committee) announce where the Summer Olympics will be held every four years, with the Winter Olympics finding themselves placed halfway between its Summer sister, again taking place every four years.
Once announced, cities can put forward bids to be reviewed by the IOC. To host the Olympics, however, host cities must meet the IOC’s extensive list of demands. How extensive? 7,000 pages worth of extensive. Demands can include: cars and drivers for all IOC members; diverted traffic and prioritized lanes for IOC vehicle that cannot be used by “regular people”; all IOC rooms to be kept at exactly 20°C; hotel bars that serve only Coca-Cola products, in order to fulfil sponsorship deals with the megacorporates; and, of course much, much more.
But there’s more to the Olympics than Diet Coke. Host cities also need to provide venues and stadiums for numerous sports events, from football to archery, kayaking to track cycling. Some cities, like London and Paris, already have many suitable venues; but other host cities, like Rio de Janeiro and Beijing, do not. They are forced to construct numerous stadiums, and at an immense political, economic and potentially social cost.
Well, maybe all of this might just make sense, you say. If the host cities don’t have stadiums, how can they host the sports? Well, fair enough. But the actual problem lies after the Olympics. The countries that built the stadiums just for the Olympics have no reason to keep using them. Unlike most of the cities that already have stadiums, and make use of the new ones they build, many poorer cities often leave their stadiums to rot. And it becomes a problem continues in a downward spiral. You see, the IOC pay none of the costs and build none of the stadiums. They only take a cut of the profits, most of which, as you might have guessed by now, come from commercial advertising. Not only are they not incentivized to lower costs, they make more money by demanding a more grandiose experience from their chosen hosts.
There is another reason, however, to decide against launching a bid to host the Olympics. Even if you have all the stadiums in place, and the capability to foot the bill, the proposed benefit of the Olympics becomes less and less true every two years onward in the cycle of this spectacle.
People seem increasingly to be losing interest in the Olympic tradition. The IOC preaches a “trickle-down” effect in sports after a country hosts their games. By hosting professional sports events, they claim, people will be encouraged to pick up footballs, racquets and boots and start playing. But this is not the case.
In a recent survey of the UK, despite the 2012 London Games, a staggering 93% felt uninspired to partake in sports in the wake of hosting the supposed pinnacle of international sport. Disinterest in the Olympics even what we might expect to be its heartland of hope. Comparing the viewership numbers of the Winter Olympics of Sochi with PyeongChang, here too there was a drop of over 5% in viewership from the previous Games. That might sound insignificant, but 3.5 million people decided not to watch the Olympics that year, having previously chosen to tune in – a massive decrease in viewing figures.
First, the cities. If you weren’t already aware of the problems the Olympics were suffering from, you might have been surprised at how few the number of cities were that proved eager to host future games. In 2015, when Boston were chosen to host the 2024 Olympics, many government employees and businessmen cheered. But the people of Boston, on the other hand, didn’t; they campaigned tirelessly until Mayor of Boston, Marty Walsh, glumly pulled out his cities bid. This November too, citizens of Calgary, Canada, voted in an identical manner, to reject the Games. And these aren’t fringe events. Since Athens 2004, bids for the Olympics have been steadily declining, with fewer and fewer cities keen to host the Games.
Notice how there were only two bids for the 2024 Games. It was that year that truly got the IOC panicked. When there were only two bids (Paris and Los Angeles), the IOC hastily awarded the 2024 Games to Paris and the 2028 to Los Angeles. If you understand what this means, well, it’s huge. In the expectation that no one would bid for the 2028 Games, the IOC pre-emptively handed them to LA, cutting off any bids for the 2028 Games before they might even be formulated. In other words, the IOC seriously believed that no city (not even LA) would be willing to host the Games for that year.
So, what now? Is that it? After all, if less and less cities want to host them - and less and less people want to watch them – might we see the death of the Olympics within a decade or two.
Perhaps not. Perhaps there is a way. Perhaps there might be a way of encouraging a resurgence in its popularity. It might sound strange, curious or even silly, but there is an answer. Video games.
Since their creation, the Olympics have been constantly evolving. The first modern Olympic Games took place in Athens, in 1896; fourteen countries participated in 9 sports over 43 events. In Rio 2016, two hundred and six nations took part in the games, with 28 sports over 306 events. And in London 2012, female athletes were finally included in every single sport, an achievement that would have been unthinkable over 100 years ago.
The types of sports chosen for the games are constantly changing as well. Some sports once were implemented into the Olympic regime have never resurfaced again after their brief debuts (polo, water motorsports and tug of war, to name just a few). Others, like archery, kayaking and football, caught on immediately, seizing global attention and intrigue. Some new sports will also be introduced in Tokyo 2020, climbing, karate and surfing, amongst them.
Of course, none of the aforementioned sports sound quite as radical as the introduction of video games – but, to my mind, the principle remains. In the past, the Olympics have (successfully and unsuccessfully) experimented with new sports to see how viable they were as a part of the Games; but, also, to see how people felt about them. They did it before and they can do it again.
Before discussing how video games can help the Olympics, we must analyse the idea as a serious one. The main criticism of video games is that e-sports (electronic sports) aren’t proper sports. They’re not as difficult as proper sports, they don’t require as much, if any, training. Let’s look at all of these. To someone unaware of both the nature and stature of e-sports, these might seem like reasonable responses, but the reality is starkly different.
The first thing that indicates the intensity of professional e-sports is the training. Olympic level athletes practice hard, dedicating massive chunks of their lives to exercising their body as well as the technique required to win. The infamous swimmer Michael Phelps trained every day, sometimes for 3-6 hours at a time. Simone Biles, a multiple gold medal winning gymnast, trains for 32 hours a week while taking a well-deserved rest on Wednesdays. Emma Coburn goes running nine times a week, covering a total distance of 80 miles. Impressive, huh? Professional gamers wouldn’t think so. The professional League of Legends team, Team Liquid, train on average for over 50 hours a week. As a group, they work out for roughly 8 hours a day, practicing against each other, alongside each other, partaking in various competitions, discussing strategy, and yes, physically exercising as well.
While the focus of e-sports training is on the video games themselves, gamers do have to keep themselves fit. It is axiomatic that letting yourself become fat and eating poorly leads to shaky mental health. By keeping in good shape, gamers can operate at their peak condition. Sure, their bodies are far from those of traditional athletes, but anyone demanding gamers have sturdy calf muscles or strong biceps to compete in the Olympics is just being silly. We don’t ask archers to have six-packs or fencers to bench-press huge weights, do we? League of Legends is renowned as one of the world’s toughest games at the professional level. Yet Team Liquid’s tough-mother training regimes aren’t anything special amongst pro-gamers. They are the norm.
Something special would be Team Liquid’s star players; “Chae ‘Piglet’ Gwan- jin and Kim ‘Fenix’ Jae-hun.” They are infamous for pushing themselves to unhealthy levels of practice – 12-14 hours of training a day, a regime that results in sleeping for just 4 hours at a time. While e-sports require less physical exertion than traditional ones, it is undeniable that the mental stamina required for such practice and competition is almost inhuman.
These regimes are justified, with the stakes high for professional competitions. One of the most recent tournaments for DOTA 2 (another popular e-sport) had a prize pool of over £15 million, sponsored by a horde of multi-national corporations, who desperately vie with each other every year to have a chance to sponsor professional events.
Okay, okay, I hear you say – so e-sports are great – but why add them to the Olympics? The first reason e-sports will help the Olympics is gender equality. Since their inception, fairness has been an integral part of the Olympics. Fighting sports, like judo and boxing are sorted into weight classes, so that you end up fighting someone of a similar muscle mass. This means that fighters must rely on skill, as opposed to just being beefier than their opponent in order to beat the competition. Since the introduction of comeptition for women in 1900, the Olympics have tried to keep up their championing fairness in sports. If they felt like the differences between men and women relevant to the sport were too big, they separated the sports into men’s and women’s categories. Otherwise, both sexes competed against and alongside one another.
This hadn’t been a problem recently until the movement of transgender athletes. Those who identify as the other gender have to go through various procedures to acquire the preferred body. This is fine, until you get to sports. Transitioned athletes are subject to much tougher drug inspections than others when it comes to gender-divided events.
This is due to the possibility of transgender athletes having a biological advantage over other athletes. As a result, the IOC try to keep hormone levels to an absolute minimum in the athletes that compete.
Finding the balance between gender equality and gender discrimination is tough at professional sports, but gaming has no such requirements. Due to the virtual nature of these games, the overall difference between male, female and transgender e-sports athletes is non-existent. By adding e-sports to the Olympics, the IOC can maintain a higher focus on gender equality in the Games.
Of course, one of the main reasons the Olympics are so costly is their stadiums. By hosting Olympics, you need individual venues for each individual sport: each requires its own arena which conforms perfectly to regulations, in measurements and surface. By contrast, e-sports is simple. All you need are seats for the audience, computers for the athletes (most of whom would rather bring at least a few parts of their own setup) and screens to show them on. These stadiums would be reused for other e-sports events, but also (more importantly) could be reused by hosts after the Games. With no sports-specific requirements, the stadiums could easily be adapted into theatres or venues with similar functions. This cheaper cost would drive up profit margins for the Games, increasing the amount of host cities willing to take part.
As already stated, another problem the Olympics face is their declining popularity. Many modern-day viewers (young people especially) don’t find the Olympics relevant anymore. But e-sports provide a serious counter to this issue, as they have a massive fanbase that is growing at an unbelievable rate. If the Olympics adopt e-sports, it is incredibly likely that they will attract a significant portion of 300 million people (predicted to reach 500 million by 2020) who already watch such events. But keep in mind, e-sports also carry another audience; sponsors. As well as bringing in more athletes and fans, the proposed introduction would also encourage companies that produce gaming related products to advertise at the Olympics to a global audience, increasing profit margins for host
nations and the IOC.
Yet, there is one problem that e-sports still need to overcome to become an official Olympic event. Recognition. For the IOC to introduce e-sports to the Olympics, they need to be convinced that e-sports truly are sports.
This, however, is easier than it might at first seem. Over 50 countries recognize e-sports as sports. This roster includes big names, like Germany, Japan, South Korea, Italy, Australia and the United States. And in the arena of professional sports games, even bigger strides are being made. The Winter X-Games in 2015 featured the popular game CSGO. The Asian Games (the second largest sporting event in the world, behind the Olympics but ahead of the World Cup) announced that e-sports will be a gold medal event in 2022. And there is one more sports group that are considering adding e-sports to their events. Can you guess who it is? Yup, the Olympics. The Paris Olympics for 2024 are considering adding e-sports to the games. While the sceptical president, Thomas Bach, declared that the video games shown can’t promote violence or “any kind of demonstration” of violence (an interesting choice of words considering the Olympics permits judo, fencing, boxing, wrestling etc.), the IOC did say they were open to the possibility of e-sports. While probably ruling out games that feature themes of war and guns (sorry, CSGO), games with much more unrealistic characters should be good to go. This is a huge step.
As time goes on, we will see whether e-sports do get implemented into the Olympic Games or not. With luck, this venerable sporting festival will recognize the immense potential that these new electronic sports have and adopt them. However, there are no guarantees. Don’t forget that this is the same IOC that awards medals for dressage.
James Macinnes 4L
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