Oh… schön here we go again!
I am internally torn between two oppositions.
On the one hand I just want to reduce the number of events per/or discipline to create a dense and compact schedule. Where everyone event is unique and all the very best athletes of the sport are competing against each other in the same event. This will made also easier to follow to the fans and watch.
On the other hand I want more sports and more events to have more Olympics.
On some days I just want to reduce the swimming schedule to just like 10 events. On others I’m fine with actual plan, even though I get headache after watching 100+ swim races and trying somehow memorized who won medals, was in the final.
I not sure how to solve this conflict.
But a few things I like to change at the Olympics are:
1) Ultra controversial here: get rid of the medal table! Just do not sum medals from different sports, which are incomparable for sake of some nationalistic pride. 23 swimmers could win shit tone of medals for the table, while 23 footballer just one. Also if a country just focuses on maximising their medal output, could just invest in few sports, which are giving a lot of medals/discipline/athletes. Also state base doping system are resulting from the ambitions of being top on the medal table.
Also the medal table is just reducing all the athletes, all their live and all the way to the Games and all the competition to just some number in the table. I hear a lot something like “How many medals we (<- our country) won? And why so little?” They don’t ask who get the medal, in which sport, how was the competition, what is their story, was it disappointment, was it lucky shot, was it fair. No they want to hear the single number. They don’t care about sport, about competition, about athletes.
Also if we get rid of the medal table, we will have less discussion about this discipline needs more event, these have too much etc. Because the importance of the sport will less dependent on the number of medals you could get.
2) I like and I want a constancy of the Olympic programme. It doesn’t mean we could add or get rid of new sports or add new events etc. But I don’t like completely changing all the programme at every game, constantly adding something or just adding new sport for one games!
3) Less controversial things: Mixed events only if they are not redundant and adding something new to the games. Having mixed 4x400m (or swimming 4x100m free) additional to the men’s and women’s one make no sense. Adding something like mixed 4x800m or mixed team in some sport like triathlon is perfectly fine for me.
4) I think all this quota reducing is ridiculous. IOC we reduced quota to reduce the cost! Hey now we can add new sports with new venues to increase costs again! Absolutely genius. Furthermore, quotas are incomparable. We could have additional 50-100 cyclist for the road race, who only are only competing for the one day (professional cyclist are also used to sleep at different hotels evert night), they are not the same quota like some team sport with two-week tournament. Also how does the number of surfers on Tahiti interfere with number of athletes in Paris?
Ok, I’m done.
For now.