Behold the giant feast. Courses upon courses. Over the past 17 days this has been a city engorged, its every nook and crevice stuffed with sport, to the point where they had to parcel some of it off to the outskirts and even wrap some of it up in a doggy bag and send it to Tahiti.
Are we not sated? As we stagger down the boulevards with a toothpick and a smug burp, trying not to think of the indigestion of Monday morning, the memory of Paris 2024 remains fresh and pristine.
As with any lavish meal, the body neatly separates it into the nourishment it needs and the excess matter it does not. The Olympics, to put it a little indelicately, needs to undergo a similar process. There are 48 disciplines across 32 sports at the modern Olympics, if you include all the isotopic variants such as BMX freestyle and rhythmic gymnastics. This is a rise of 41 per cent since the Barcelona Games of 1992, 20 per cent since London 2012. How much is too much?
The Los Angeles Games of 2028 will feature five new sports: baseball/softball, cricket, flag football, lacrosse and squash. In the other direction, breaking and perhaps boxing are poised to make way. But we can do better than this. This patient needs to go on a diet before it does itself some serious harm.
Before we begin, a few ground rules. Sports that appeal to the widest possible global base should be prioritised. Plus points for sports that can be staged in cities. And plus points for the “wow factor”, sports that work on social media as well as they do in the stadium, sports that push the boundaries of the body over sports that consist largely of a bunch of guys slowly becoming sweatier.
So athletics stays. Gymnastics, cycling, basketball, BMX, skateboarding and climbing make the cut on all the above criteria. Wrestling and weightlifting are simple, primal tests of the body. Judo, boxing and taekwondo are the purest of the combat sports. Handball, table tennis and badminton are classic hand-eye co-ordination sports with low bars to entry. Diving, canoeing and beach volleyball all score high on the “wow factor”. Shooting, fencing and hockey are hanging on by a thread. But among the rest there is plenty of low-hanging fruit.
Sailing: How many of you own a boat? How many of you could get access to a boat and – checks notes – a sea to sail it in? Of all the many anachronisms at the modern Olympics, sailing is perhaps the most conspicuous of all: a continuing sop to super-rich men who founded the Games and still just really love yachts, basically inaccessible to most of the countries in the world, even the ones with a viable coastline. Plus it is basically unwatchable as a spectator sport, liable to be postponed if there is either no wind or too much wind, and has a set of penalty rules indecipherable to all but the most avid boat people, which as we’ve established, you are almost certainly not.
Anything with a horse: From the Olympic charter: “Sports, disciplines or events in which performance depends essentially on mechanical propulsion are not acceptable.” This is the basis upon which motorsports continue to be banned from the Games. So, a question: what does it really matter if the form of mechanical propulsion has ears, a tail and a silly name?
Archery: A homage to medieval military combat reduced to the level of holiday-camp activity. If we’re going to have an arrows sport in the Olympics, there’s frankly only one choice. Luke Littler for LA 2028.
Surfing: Surfing is great. But it runs into the same problem as sailing: what is the point of an Olympic sport you have to stage away from the Olympics?
3x3 basketball: Look, we’ve all had to play in a game where not quite enough people turned up. You play half-pitch football because you couldn’t get the numbers. A couple of your guys have to field for the opposition because they brought nine. Only in basketball is this makeshift exigency somehow elevated to the level of Olympic medals.
Golf: Let’s be honest: this hasn’t really worked, has it? As heartwarming as it has been seeing Xander Schauffele and Scottie Scheffler fattening their trophy cabinets in front of politely applauding crowds, nothing about this sport screams “Olympics”. Quite apart from the fact that its founding values – avarice, solitude, peace and quiet – are essentially anathema to everything the Olympics are. Can you imagine a golfer lighting the Olympic torch? And properly, not just with their cigarette lighter. Exactly.
Volleyball: In a contracting Games, it is increasingly difficult to make the case there should be two separate disciplines of volleyball, and – sorry – beach won. There are probably one too many Olympic sports that give off the vibe of “provincial leisure centre at 6pm”. With regrets, volleyball gets the short straw.
Men’s football: With a caveat. You get the best players in the world to turn up, like they do in tennis, and you can stay.
Swimming: Okay, not all the swimming. But pretty much all the bits that are just weird forms of swimming. No other sport allows participants to simply do it backwards and call it a separate event with separate medals. As impressive as Michael Phelps and Léon Marchand are, you do have to ask whether, if they can win multiple medals in multiple disciplines, those disciplines are all that different. Swimming occupies far too much Games real estate. Keep the freestyle at its various distances. Keep one medley race to give Adam Peaty something to do at weekends. The rest, unfortunately, goes into the great Games intestine for ejection: an ugly and regrettable process, but one from which the body as a whole will emerge far healthier as a result.
