1. Basketball. Olympic basketball has typically devolved into overfed American basketball players bringing down 200 pounds and at least six and a half feet of national greatness onto opponents’ heads. I would have a problem with this, but a.) there’s more competitive parity in international basketball than ever before, and b.) I am American.
VINCE CARTER OWNS EIGHT HUNDRED SQUARE FEET OF HIS CHOICE IN THE LOUVRE AND ALWAYS WILL.
Also, Olympic men’s basketball has already led to Boogie Cousins protesting his teammates putting him on Snapchat too much by refusing to let everyone off the bus. When someone suggested they were going to beat him up if he did not move, this was his response.
I done got beat up before, man, I ain’t trippin
DeMarcus Cousins is in the Olympics and could have kept them all on the bus forever. This is our finest sport, nationally, internationally, and perhaps on a galactic level.
2. Track and Field. It’s not fair, really, since Track and Field encompasses like 90 different things, but for economy it can’t be beaten because there are events that only take nine seconds. Track and Field is the snack bar of the Olympics, and each bite only contains the heartbreak of elite athletes watching their dreams incinerated in like, 15 seconds of competition. Highlight: Watching the hammer throw and wondering how anyone ever does it, much less how their limbs don’t fly off in every direction on the windup.
3. Gymnastics. THE BEST. Only the possibility of the American women losing to equal competition brings it down the rankings, and takes it out of the top spot. For like, the eighth straight Olympics, I’m begging the IOC to please consider taking a random person out of the audience and allowing them to attempt each event on international television. It’s in the Olympic spirit to want to watch a 47-year-old French eyeglass executive with a heavy smoking habit attempt the vault, and then be hauled off the floor after fracturing his sternum—-for international brotherhood.
Photo by Scott Halleran/Getty Images
4. Soccer. Double the delicious poison of nationalism in competition with the very real possibility that you can get someone like Cameroon or Mexico a gold medal, and you’re playing with solid fireworks. (To wit: Brazil tying with Iraq in group play this year, something that in theory should never, ever happen.) Nigeria got a gold in 1996, another piece of evidence that the Atlanta games were the most entertaining and nonsensical Olympic games ever.
5. Swimming (with Katie Ledecky decimating everything in her path). Essential viewing you should cancel things like family birthdays for. Katie Ledecky was pumping her fist with one hand on the wall while the silver medalist was finishing. She is so dominant at her sport that I almost forgot to note how weird it is to be the best at a physical activity humans really shouldn’t be good at. It’s like being the bird who can run the fastest.
6. Rugby Sevens. The sorcery of vomit on the wing. It’s not possible to watch Rugby Sevens without noticing that there are way, way fewer people on the pitch, and that they are all running fast enough to make mortals throw up hammers. If only there were some way of knowing how many were on that field for each team, though; if only. Such is mystery.
7. Handball. The most made-up looking sport at the Olympics, since it’s literally just seven people to a side trying to throw a ball into a net. There’s not even dribbling, and thus no penalty for traveling. Dwight Howard ended up playing the wrong game, skillset-wise. Not far off from dodgeball, really, provided the part of “Terrified Unathletic Child” was played by the goalie every time. Also way more fun than it has any right to be, just like Calvinball played on a basketball court would be.
Photo by Phil Walter/Getty Images
8. Swimming (without Katie Ledecky decimating everything in her path). It’s fine, especially if we can gin up a probably overblown rivalry with a country over something they won last time. (“FRANCE STOLE OUR RELAY MEDALS! WE’LL RENEW THE ANCIENT RIVALRY OVER MODERN DISCO’S LINEAGE IN RIO, YOU BASTARDS.”)
9. Weightlifting. So good in small doses, especially for the smaller lifters who should not be able to put twice their bodyweight overhead like ants. Especially good to watch with Crossfitters, who will inevitably critique the Olympic lifting technique of a 104-pound Chinese lady lifter whose max is four times their own. Irony is an Olympic value, too. Oh, do you want to know if they’re all explosively farting at the bottom of their lifts? You bet they are.
10. Table Tennis. Main attraction in a sport almost too fast to watch: unexpectedly jacked legs on all competitors. Ping pong players look like someone who only squats, every day, for three hours at the gym, every day for the entirety of their lives. This person then leaves the squat rack without so much as touching another weight, and steps up to a ping-pong table to absolutely wreck shit with little more than lightning reflexes and the quads of Colossus himself.
Photo by Mike Ehrmann/Getty Images
11. Synchronized Swimming. An absolutely absurd sport that should not exist and THAT IS WHY IT IS SO DAMN ENTERTAINING LOOK THAT LADY IS DOING A HANDSTAND OFF ANOTHER SWIMMER’S BACK AND SMILING WHILE THE LADY TREADS WATER HARD ENOUGH TO BE A HUMAN LIFE RAFT. Secretly, I’m sure this is a thin veneer of cheer over a world of physical torment, psychological warfare, and despicable, bloodthirsty politics. I don’t know if all that makes it a sport, and I don’t care. I like writing little spec scripts about the judges and their weird hustles to take cash to pay off their gambling debts in Monaco too much to care. If you disagree you want things in life to make sense, and that is so not my fault, reader.
12. Modern Pentathlon. I know an event where you ride a horse, run, swim, shoot a gun, and use a blade is supposed to be gentlemanly or something. But change the horse to a pig, and this is basically the skill set of everyone I know from Jefferson County, Tenn. Fetch you some gold medalists from them hollers, USOC.
13. Shooting. Lower than they should be because shooting events turn you into the most psychotic sports dad on the planet. This is an event where the best in the world can hit 20 out of 20 shots at distance, and because your brain is flexible and stupid you will begin to be intolerant of even tiny failures after three minutes’ viewing.
For example:
Announcer: And here’s Kim Rhode, going for a perfect 100 out of 100 shooting a tiny bullet at a tiny target from an impossibly long distance, a woman so dominant in her sport that a bullet company put her on their boxes along with John Wayne and Theodore Roosevelt. She’s better at this than you are at anything in your life.
Rhode: [inhales, lines up shot]
Me: [boils with silent tension]
[Rhode misses]
Me: GODDAMMIT, KIM, GET IT TOGETHER, YOU’RE FALLING TO PIECES OUT THERE.
Photo by Sam Greenwood/Getty Images
14. Judo. A beautiful, intellectual, and physically demanding experience for the competitors. Unfortunately, judo mostly looks like burly people yanking each other around by their pajamas to the casual viewer, periodically interrupted by one of them falling loudly to the mat.
15. Cycling (BMX). Another sport added to pad American medal counts, which is fine because Michael Phelps is retiring after these games and we will need the help badly.
16. Cycling (Mountain Bike). See above. Aside from everyone on a mountain bike kind of looking like a 14-year-old no matter their age? Fine, especially watching world-class athletes eat shit over their handlebars falling on a course pulled straight out of your adolescent bike fantasies. This being Rio, that awesome and seemingly perfect mountain bike course is probably built on a heavy metal disposal site.
Photo by Buda Mendes/Getty Images
17. Cycling (Road). Too emotionally harrowing. Honestly cyclists should be able to take whatever drugs they want just to ensure my emotional stability as a viewer, since I could watch without thinking about the hell-level agony they’re going through. I like Chris Froome. I hope he is on dilaudid and cocaine for the entirety of every race he ever races for the rest of his life, because cycling hurts.
18. Cycling (Track). If NASCAR were based on thigh circumference.
19. Rowing. Basically just team road cycling done on water. Give them whatever drugs they want so I can watch it without sympathetically dry heaving, too.
20. Beach Volleyball. The lukewarm take is the true one: it’s just okay, though the venue is always a beach, and thus supposedly a good one, ignoring the fact that the beach is usually sandy, filled with people you don’t want to hang out with and, in the case of beach volleyball, packed with speakers blasting “Centuries” by Fall Out Boy. The Olympics, being sponsored largely by corporations, are thus susceptible to Fall Out Boy, the band writing music for exactly eight powerful corporate executives who love their music.
21. Tennis. Con: the best players in the world, putting on sort of an effort. Pro: the best players in the world still showed up, which makes Olympic tennis kind of the randomly placed buffet roast beef carving station of the Olympics. It’s there, and we’re not sure why, but you’ll eat some anyway.
22. Field Hockey. Deeply underrated, if only for the restraint teams show in NOT battering each other too obviously with sticks. Unusual in that no one, in the entire history of the sport stretching back to the Middle Ages, has ever thought of getting a longer stick.
Photo by Rob Carr/Getty Images
23. Boxing. Easily the most 19th century part of the Olympics, especially now that they took the headgear off and will let participants inflict unmitigated head trauma in the name of international solidarity and brotherhood. Your granddad will watch it, maybe.
24. Diving. A complex and sophisticated sport which you will as a viewer boil down to “did they make a big splash or nah, because I know that’s real bad if they do.” If someone asks you the best diver of all time, it is Stephan Feck. On the positive side, it’s very relaxing watching divers chill in the hot tub, a feature that should be added to more sports for athletes waiting around to do things. (This would be amazing in baseball, for instance, where a right fielder could lounge in warm comfort until he’s needed.)
25. Fencing. Another sport so quick you assume you could button-mash your way to a medal if you were fast enough. (You could not.) Needs a sub-discipline where participants fight with dull axes or gravity hammers from Halo.
26. Badminton. Living in Taiwan and having men who smoked two packs a day line up with 30 pounds of beerweight on their waists to annihilate you in a game where you hit a feathered buttplug is one of the most horrifying memories you can possibly have. To hell with badminton, a sport so stressful to its participants that every shot seems like an unpleasant surprise to the players. “OH GOD HE HIT THE THING AGAIN, DIDN’T HE—”
27. Wrestling. Another sport where the ancient intricacies of weight transfer and move/countermove are overwhelmed by the viewer’s overall sensation of “why won’t that sweaty mean person get off that other slightly less mean sweaty person.” At its best it is complex, brawny chess; at its worst it looks like two very hostile people refusing at all costs to shake each others’ hands even though they must shake hands.
28. Water polo. I want it to be better, I really do, but without constant underwater shots of everyone punching each other in the stomachs and tearing at each other’s swimsuits it’s just a hard sport to stage on television. Rivals handball for sheer torture-level exploitation of goalies.
Photo by Quinn Rooney/Getty Images
29. Taekwondo. Surprisingly hesitant viewing, and contrary to everything Best of the Best taught me contains very few a.) in-ring fatalities, and b.) long redemption arcs resulting in manly tears and hugging.
30. Equestrian. Notable only for the parade of wealthy mutants who compete in it, and for the ongoing travesty of the horses being awarded nothing for their effort. “San Domingo Velasquez de la Ralle is a Brazilian natural gas heir whose other hobbies include running an F1 team and cultivating orchids. His horse, Alonzo, is irrelevant to everything happening today. Both are devastatingly handsome and well-groomed by a team of no less than five personal attendants.”
Photo by Rob Carr/Getty Images
31. Sailing. Really a sport where you’re just rooting for fabric engineering and wind, though the very real risk of competitors running headlong into abandoned couches in the water does add some intrigue. (I SWEAR I WROTE THIS BEFORE THIS MAY OR MAY NOT HAVE HAPPENED.)
32. Triathlon. Another exercise in sadism, though it is fun to think of triathlon as “Multitasking: the Endurance Sport Edition.”
33. Archery. Oh man archery is so fun to do, if not to watch. My brother went to a private school where everyone had expensive compound bows. One day we were hanging out and he looked at his phone and said, “Oh, John Michael’s coming over to shoot his new bow.” John Michael pulled up, got out his new bow, and took a few shots well off-center before announcing “something was wrong” with the new bow.
My brother picked it up and hit two dead-center shots. John Michael picked it up, said “I gotta get this straight,” and huffed off. I don’t think they talked for months. My point is that archery is savage, and that even men who call each other friends have dark, wordless, and terrifying emotional lives.
Photo by Paul Gilham/Getty Images
34. Canoe sprint. Not entirely opposed to Olympic sports expanding to any and all drunken games you come up with at 10 p.m. on a weekend at the lake house.
35. Trampoline. See “drunken games you come up with at 10 p.m. on a weekend at the lake house.” It’s fine. Trampoline is fine.
36. Golf. The irony of watching golfers try to be patriotic is fun, since most of them own gifted condos in Dubai they might not even know they have. Also disappointing that there is no team play, because watching golfers try to work together is like watching someone try to carriage race a team of cats.
37. Canoe slalom. Will revise to the No. 1 spot if, contrary to expectations, this is a mountain event involving no water whatsoever.
38. Rhythmic gymnastics. Be honest and admit that Extremely Arrhythmic Gymnastics would be much, much more entertaining.
39. Marathon swimming. “Take all the excitement of watching someone run for 26.2 miles, and then place it out of view underwater.”
