The pageantry of the Olympic Games are diverting attention from a question which must keep members of the International Olympic Committee awake at night: will the modern Games survive?

“If we don’t get young people playing sport, we won’t be here for very much longer,” IOC spokesperson Mark Adams said at a press conference last week. “We have to attract young audiences and go where they are… we have to attract young people to sport or we are dead, basically.”

“Or we are dead”?

Did he really say that?

He did. It’s scary, but Adams could be right. The figures for how many people watched the Paris Olympics aren’t in yet. But a Gallup poll taken before the Games showed that interest peaked for the London Games in 2012 and has been declining ever since. In 2012, 59 percent of Americans planned to watch “a lot” of the televised sports; this year the figure was only 35 percent. And in 2012 only 13 percent said that they were not going to watch the Olympics at all; this year, the figure is 30 percent. Only 56 percent of Americans could even name where the 2024 Olympics is taking place.

According to Gallup, interest in the Olympics is falling across all socio-economic groups. But the political divide is reflected in who’s watching the Games. Democrats (46%) are far more likely to watch than Republicans (31%), college graduates (47%) than high school graduates (25%), richer households (44%) than poorer households (28%), over-50s (42%) than under 50s (30%).

If the IOC were a media organisation, it ought to be terrified by these stats. The Games is becoming entertainment for wealthy baby boomer Democrats – and millions of them drop off the perch every year. But the IOC is a media organization. According to the IOC, 61 percent of its US$7.6 billion in revenue in 2017 – 2021 came from media rights. Without an audience, how long will it be able to sell the games to broadcasters?

This explains why the Paris Olympics is desperately trying to attract younger viewers with cool new sports like skateboarding, BMX, surfing, sport climbing. E-sports are on the horizon.

But will this work? According to Gallup, the most anticipated sport by a country mile is women’s gymnastics, with 68 percent listing it in their top three choices. Trailing behind were track and field and swimming, for both men and women, with about 30 percent.

Breakdancing, which is a sport at the Paris Olympics, was not highly anticipated by the people surveyed by Gallup.

An academic study of the Olympics and the World Cup in the journal Tourism Management last year concluded that “the future of these two events is now highly uncertain and that previous growth might not continue, therefore questioning the implicit growth logic that has underpinned the Olympic Games and the World Cup for much of their existence.”

The authors say that the future is far from certain. The Games could grow, could plateau, or could decline:

In this scenario, the societal and events-related crisis factors … radically change the nature of mega-events as we know them. Potential hosts no longer bid for mega-events due to their excessive costs, uncertain economic and tourism impacts and poor sustainability record; more and more communities challenge their city governments due to overtourism concerns; fewer and fewer visitors travel to watch competitions in person in a carbon-constrained world where various green new deals imposed by national governments put limits on mega-event organizers’ attempts to attract large numbers of tourists and local fans; people no longer watch events on pay TV that do not interest them and broadcast revenue starts to decline; and hosts put on ‘bare bones’ events at minimal cost.

The Olympic Games is a treasure, a glorious celebration of human achievement, a bond of fellowship, a fortnight of international goodwill. But its future is far from guaranteed. The League of Nations died. The International Refugee Organization died. The Warsaw Pact died. NATO could soon be on life support.

There will always be an appetite for sport – but the immense popularity of the World Cup shows that it can be satisfied in other ways. Like every other media event, the Olympics has to compete for eyeballs and funding. The Ancient Greek Olympics lasted for a thousand years, but there is no guarantee that the modern Olympics will do the same.

With all this in mind, why is the IOC doffing its hat to woke slogans? Gender self-ID has created a huge controversy and threatens the future of women’s sports. “Meat is murder” chefs are starving athletes of protein. Environmentally-friendly cardboard beds have given athletes sleepless nights. Swimming in the Seine has sent athletes to hospital. “Save the planet” means no air-conditioning in sweltering heat. Virulently anti-Christian scenes and a disgusting threesome portrayed in the Opening Ceremony have alienated many viewers.

Go woke, go broke. The IOC needs to listen to the outrage over some of its ideologically inspired policies.

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This article was originally published on Mercator under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Image credit: “Helsinki Olympics 1952,” CC BY 4.0. Image cropped.