Summer Olympics sports tier list

After 10 days of my life revolving around the Summer Olympics, I’m happy to present my tier list of Summer Olympics sports, as a spectator. This is not a scientific endeavour and it does reflect all my biases, including those against team sports and in favour of France.

Top-tier, great craic

These are absolutely incredible sports, to the point that I could watch some replays and might consider watching the regular season.

• Athletics: shot put, discus throw, hammer throw, javelin throw. So incredibly underrated and so, so fun!
• Athletics: combined events (decathlon & heptathlon). Absolutely amazing performances from incredibly impressive athletes. This is perfect. Also, I hope women will get a decathlon eventually.
• Cycling: BMX freestyle, men. (See below for the gender separation explanation.)
• Cycling: BMX racing. I used to do it as a kid and still enjoy watching it. Also, my partner doesn’t like it and the reasons they gave me (short races, long waits) are exactly the issue with short-track speed skating, so I’m fully used to them and don’t mind them at all.
• Modern pentathlon. See also: modern pentathlon is the best sport.
• Rugby sevens. 10/10, would rugby sevens again, I love how they solve all the issues of rugby union which is already great. I might be slightly biased by Antoine Dupont and/or the French men’s performance.
• Triathlon. I knew I’d enjoy triathlon (I’ve been wanting to do triathlon for a while and wanted to watch it). I didn’t know I’d watch it for an hour and a half straight without even realizing how much time had elapsed. Given my attention capacity, this is a high feat. Well done, triathlon!

I also want to say that pretty much all mixed events and team relays, no matter the discipline, belong here because they feel like a perfect highlight of the competition. I’ll happily echo my dad’s opinion, which is that every individual event that has a mixed team competition (judo, swimming, triathlon, track…) should only have that and get rid of sex-segregated teams altogether.

High tier, really cool

These are on my priority watchlist for the next Olympics. They’re the kind of sports that I watch even if there’s nobody from my country involved.

• Archery, somehow? I really didn’t expect this to go so fast and be so fun and easy to understand. You look at someone, see their scores, go « ooh » if they have more points, it’s perfect.
• Athletics: High jump, pole vault. Fun times!
• Aquatics: Artistic swimming. Surprisingly fun and engaging to watch, I like the new rules and how they allow us to understand (a bit) what’s going on, love the super-themed choreography. A great surprise given my original lack of enthusiasm.
• Aquatics: Diving. I really like diving, except for the 10m synchronized one. All the other diving ones have me riveted to my screen, they’re great.
• Athletics: Track events. I knew 100m and relays would be nice, I didn’t expect to enjoy the women’s 5000m or the 4×400m so much.
• Canoeing: slalom. Really fun, especially kayak cross!
• Cycling: track. Severely underrated, love it.
• Equestrian: Eventing. Accidentally opened the stream and then failed to close it for an hour and a half. Highly recommend it (especially when it’s in a place as beautiful as the Versailles garden).
• Table tennis. Every Summer Olympics, I suddenly remember that high-level table tennis is very fun to watch.
• Volleyball (classic). Ended up enjoying this way more than I thought I would.

Mid tier, nice to watch

These are nice to watch when I’m bored but I don’t seek them out and might just go clean the bathroom instead.

• Aquatics: Swimming. It’s nice to see Léon Marchand win stuff I guess, but this is a sport where you watch people who vaguely look like a glans all doing the same move in a big rectangle until one touches the wall first. They don’t even punch each other. Boooring.
• Athletics: Long jump, triple jump. What even is going on?
• Cycling: BMX freestyle, women. The sport is still really new for women’s competitions and there’s a really painful gender gap, but it’s real nice to watch and I have real hope that it will be high tier really soon.
• 3×3 basket-ball. This solves everything I dislike about basketball and keeps what I like. It almost went to the high tier section until I realized I don’t watch if France isn’t involved.
• Canoeing: Sprint. Better than rowing, still monotonous.
• Equestrian: Jumping. Surprisingly good, but still very repetitive. They should have one version where they all start at the same time and have to push other people out of the way to get to the finish line first.
• Gymnastics: Artistic. I’m more of a men’s gymnastics person myself (possibly related to some… ahem, aesthetic, criteria), but I enjoyed both.
• Judo. Interest inversely correlated to the weight category; the heavy players are too static for my taste, but the lighter ones are a delight.
• Shooting was way more fun than I expected, which means it was tolerable.
• Sport climbing: speed. Short and fun.
• Taekwondo. Roundhouse kicks in the face! Love it.
• Wrestling: freestyle. Looks fun, it’s like judo but more barbaric. I’ll allow it.

Low-tier, time for a break

I am grateful for all of these sports because if all Olympic sports were between mid and top tier, I would not have enough time to eat, take bathroom breaks, and survive.

• Aquatics: Water-polo. This is in the « basket-ball » category of « cool sport, not really my thing, but cool sport ».
• Athletics: Road events. See below, same reasons as « marathon swimming ». (tl:dr; too long.)
• Basket-ball. It’s nice to have a different ruleset from the NBA and to let the US remember there’s a world outside of them; I just have a hard time getting interested in basket-ball.
• Badminton. Sorry, I just can’t.
• Breaking. What am I watching? Are these figures impressive? What’s going on?
• Skateboard (street), men. It’s not bad, it’s just slightly boring and repetitive, and too short / not impressive enough to go « whoaa » or try to guess scores.
• Equestrian: Dressage. Watched two minutes, got bored. I do love that the horse dudes obviously love their horse and respect it. Warms my heart every time.
• Fencing. I have no more patience left for fencing. I didn’t even watch some of the French finals. I just couldn’t anymore.
• Golf. It’s not bad, it’s even pretty hypnotic, but I can’t get myself to care.
• Handball. I’d put it in Trash tier if I had any arguments for it, but it definitely belongs as an Olympic sport, I just really don’t like it. It could be good but filming is always sooo bad.
• Rowing. I think I’d enjoy doing it. I’m bored to death watching it. Full respect to rowers, though; it’s just not spectator-friendly, in my opinion.
• Sport climbing: combined. I don’t really enjoy bouldering and so I always forget to watch the rest.
• Wrestling: Greco-Roman. Very static, so it’s hard (in my opinion) to get excited at what’s going on.

Trash tier, no idea why these are Olympic

This is a small tier because I love the Olympics.

• Boxing. Why is this a judge sport? What even are the rules? Do the boxers even understand what the expectations are? They don’t look like they do. Also, fuck Umar Kremlev and the banned IBA, and full support to the CIO for doing the right thing this time.
• Football, men. With drastic rules in place to make it less interesting, might as well just replace it with futsal.
• Skateboard (park + street), girls. I won’t say « women » because if it did involve women who had gone through puberty it would be higher on the list. Right now it’s just really boring child abuse.
• Surfing. Wait 15 minutes not knowing when something’s going to happen. See one surfer get really excited and suddenly get up. Watch the surfer disappear inside a wave for 5 seconds. See the surfer get out of the wave and pump their fist in the air. Learn they’re world champion.
• Tennis. I don’t like tennis, France likes tennis enough to inundate my sports streams on a regular basis, I like tennis even less. Men’s tennis is even worse due to, well, Djokovic.

Unranked

These might be great! But I missed them, or they haven’t happened yet (in which case I’ll update this post as we go).

Didn’t watch, won’t watch

• Aquatics: Marathon swimming. I expected them to be long and boring and didn’t give them a chance. Also, I overslept. Sorry, marathon swimmers − I do think you’re really impressive and deserve to be at the Olympics.
• Cycling: Mountain biking. I normally watch world cups and enjoy them, so I assume it would have been high tier.
• Cycling: Road. I’m sorry I’m so bored and I can’t be bothered to be interested because I’ve just survived the Tour de France overload. My partner says the Olympics road cycling is much cooler because it doesn’t have the pro teams and they don’t have audio contact with their coaches so I’d be more likely to watch it than to watch non-Olympic road cycling, but that still makes it « not likely ».
• Field hockey. Truly sorry to field hockey players. I got bored really quick, mostly from not knowing the rules at all, and gave up before giving it a real chance.
• Gymnastics: Trampoline. Missed it, didn’t care enough to watch the replay.
• Sailing. Didn’t watch, couldn’t muster enough energy to care.
• Volleyball (beach). Didn’t give it a chance. I can force myself to enjoy a game of classic volleyball, but 2v2 on a beach isn’t engaging at all for me.

Hasn’t happened yet (will update later)

• Gymnastics: Rhythmic.
• Skateboard (park), men.
• Weightlifting.