the bummer olympics
on beijing 2022
Did you watch the 2022 Winter Olympics?
Actually, better question (not that I don’t care about you, specifically) - did anyone? As the New York Times shared as a postmortem today -
“An average of 11.4 million viewers watched the Beijing Olympics on NBCUniversal platforms each night — the smallest prime-time audience on record for any Winter Games…”
For context, 112.3 million people in the US watched the Super Bowl just last Sunday, amidst the Olympics. “But Priyanka, that’s not a fair comparison! The Super Bowl is our last great vestige of monoculture left!” You’re right! And many a thinkpiece has been written on the fractured streaming landscape, even when it comes to sports, and such that linear ratings aren’t a fair metric by any means. Slate even purports its possible that this was actually one of the most-watched Olympics ever, we were all just “watching on our phones and in our browsers.”
But even if you did watch - whether a full event replay on Peacock or a highlight reel on YouTube or a behind-the-scenes of an athlete on Instagram - did you care?
Hosting the Summer Olympics in 2008 was supposed to be China’s arrival into a more global stage, and in becoming the only city to host both Summer and Winter Olympics, 2022 was meant to be a similar follow-up, less of a footnote and more of a sequel. Even some of the same venues were used. And yet, a lot has happened in 14 years, even outside of the last 2 super traumatic years - none of which was in this Winter Olympics’ favor. Climate change acceleration meant manmade courses and dystopian venues, and a downhill run that seemed to confound many of the clearly very very experienced Olympian skiiers. Sports federations have been exposed for systemic doping issues and have seen middling or largely only symbolic consequences. Social media has given us more access into all aspects of the world - except for China, which is still closed to the majority of services and platforms the rest of the world readily uses to connect. Instead of becoming more open, China has become more closed and insular - and has been embroiled in human rights abuses, broad ones such as the accusations of crimes against humanity of of the Uyghur minority to singular ones like China’s silencing of tennis star Peng Shuai, after her accusation of sexual assault against a top sports official. And that’s all without the global pandemic (idk if you heard that was still going on?) that stripped the Games of crowds, entourages, and even athletes from the competition.
Great atmosphere for an Olympics, no?
And it didn’t get any better once they actually started.
The Opening Ceremonies shifted to primarily light show pyrotechnics due to COVID, (unlike the spectacle of 2008’s Opening Ceremonies), with only despots in attendance. Mikaela Shiffrin, all over NBC’s promotions of the Games, left without a medal, ‘skiing out’ of some of her star events. She did not receive the same outpouring of support that Simone Biles did (although they were in different situations, I’m comparing gold-medal favorite narratives here) but sure did deal a similar amount of vitriol and bullying for not being mentally ‘tough enough,’ - depressing, but not unexpected still in the world of sport. The women’s figure skating competition was marred with scandal, with one of the oddest, most dispiriting, ugly sports incidents I’ve seen in a while took place when final scores were awarded: the gold medalist, Anna Shcherbakova, celebrating with no one while her compatriot, 15-year-old Kamila Valieva, the up-until-then-gold-medal-favorite who had tested positive for banned substances but was allowed to compete anyway, openly sobbed, devastated at her performance, bullied by her coach as soon as she stepped off the ice for her poor form. Disturbing stuff. If we expect viewers to turn their fractured attention and put in the effort to watch events 12 hours after they occurred, when I could easily find spoilers for them on the internet, this is not the stuff they want to watch, the inspiring Olympic stuff of dreams. This is not fun at all.
There were a few spots of joy for the U.S. team - Nathan Chen’s stunning gold medal run in men’s figure skating, complete with a record number of quadruple jumps; Erin Jackson’s gold in speed skating, achieved only six years after she skated on ice for the very first time - could you have gotten Olympic-gold-medalist good at a sport in a mere six years? I sure as hell couldn’t. And yet, I felt like their success hardly made a splash, whether anecdotally among family and friends but even across the internet. Where were their Wheaties boxes equivalent, even as cereal has fallen out of style? When I was a kid, Tara Lipinski became a household name in her Olympics, alongside Michelle Kwan, Apolo Anton Ohno, Shaun White. And lest it be a Winter Olympics popularity vs Summer Olympics popularity thing, I felt similarly to Suni Lee’s gold-medal women’s gymnastics all around run in Tokyo last summer - Lee deserves to be a star, and yet does she have the same recognition as her predecessor winners of the same medal? These athletes put their bodies and lives through the wringer to win medals for their country, and in a less fragmented world they were rewarded for their success once they hit this pinnacle of achievement. But in 2022, with so much else to turn our attention to, Olympic champions no longer become household names. Hardly more people tune into watch them than reruns of The Big Bang Theory on TBS.
Some athletes are more than okay with this - fame and recognition can be tough for anyone, let along young disciplined athletes competing in sports normally obscured and underfunded except once every four years, as empathetically outlined in The Weight of Gold documentary. Snowboarder Chloe Kim took a long break from her sport after the pressures of fame that followed her gold medal run in Pyeongchang. Her repeat of the achievement in Beijing, all the more impressive considering her hiatus, hardly seemed to resonate - but maybe that’s better for her in a vacuum. There’s a whole conversation to be had about how there are no global celebrities of any kind anymore - can you name one that’s been minted in the past five years that’s not a politician? Someone both your mom and your hip coworker know? And does it even matter if no one knows who wins if the athletes themselves are happy?
The amount of money at stake throws a wrench in here - NBC pays billions of dollars for rights to the Olympics, assuming that viewers will tune in and drive some sort of cultural resonance (and thus NBC can command advertising dollars), and the athletes are key to that tune-in. But once you peek into how that money corrupts the International Olympics Committee and incentivizes them to hold the Games under any circumstances, under the purview of any government, without a thought to said athletes, it leaves a sour taste. A sneak peek under the curtain at how corrupt the International Olympic Committee is, and it’s hard to turn back. What’s supposed to be a global culmination of sportsmanship and achievement becomes instead an exercise in overlooking the many many awful forces at play. Bright spots of any kind in this Olympics get quickly overshadowed by the broadcast audience indifference, sure, but more dispiritingly by disappointment, by misconduct, by scandal.
If the current pace of change is any indication, the world will look likely look pretty different (warmer??) during the next Summer Olympics, in Paris - let alone the next Winter Olympics in Milan in 2026. Everything seems to be getting a little bit worse, on many fronts - so it doesn’t seem fair to pin the hopes of turning around the entire global mood on any one sports tournament, especially when increasingly they may all be corrupt (hello, World Cup(s) in Qatar, much?). There’s a glimmer of hope that we learn from the scandals of today - there have been calls to raise the age limit in women’s figure skating, for one; the mental health conversation sports is constantly evolving and moving at a faster pace than maybe I’m giving it credit for. And it’s possible that the increased scrutiny on falling attention and ratings might inspire positive change so people feel good about tuning in again - since ratings are linked to the one thing the IOC seems to care about (cough, money). We can only wait and watch, from our browsers, from our phones, from the sidelines to see.
Until next time, with winning moments to warm your cold icy heart for the road -