No break dancing and fewer swimming medals: What my perfect Olympics would look like

A host city is yet to put on a faultless Games but here are 10 steps to Olympics perfection for future reference

Usually it is clear within the first week whether an Olympics will live long in the memory. This time, for travelling British fans and viewers back home, it felt like a winner even sooner than that.
Some positives have coalesced in Paris, with the combination of an agreeable time zone, plenty of success for Team GB and the return of crowds after the hollow sadness of Tokyo 2021.
Green Pool-tastic Rio 2016 was a logistical pain for British viewers and those on the ground complained about a poorly located Olympic Park which felt about as authentically Brazilian as Doha. Everybody agrees that London 2012 was an unqualified success, unless you happen to be from somewhere other than London.
Every Games provides lessons for its successors and even a consensus Good Olympics like Paris 2024 could do with some tweaks. So how do you deliver an unimpeachable, all-time faultless Olympic Games? Here are 10 steps to Olympics perfection:
Must provide enough scenic source material for well-placed TV studio, sweeping drone shots to pad out the coverage and a really strong opening title sequence. Must have functional infrastructure and reasonable local cuisine. Must not be the sort of place you have to feign approval of when a friend tells you they’re going there on holiday. Tokyo, Paris, Los Angeles, Brisbane: absolutely yes. Riyadh: probably not. A UK-friendly timezone helps too, although there is a certain amount of fun in either getting up very early or staying up very late for excitement / disappointment.
Paris and Tokyo have set a welcome trend of eschewing the white elephants which have blighted previous large-scale sporting events. Some are wistful for the all-encompassing Olympic Park which houses the majority of events but it seems preferable to put things in logical existing venues and disperse the inevitable crowds across your city, especially when it looks as lovely as Paris.
We’re looking at you, River Seine triathlon and surfing in Tahiti.
A mildly controversial view, but: the more the merrier. If you don’t want to watch Olympic football / golf / tennis then other sports are available. The whole ‘not the pinnacle of the sport’ argument holds some water but football attracts massive crowds, golfers seem to be more excited about the Olympics with every passing cycle and who does not enjoy the heartwarming sight of Novak Djokovic winning another tennis match? Nevertheless we are at bloating point already with 329 events across 32 sports which encompass 48 disciplines. So cap the core sports at the current level (with squash, debuting in LA, replacing breaking, a failed experiment in Paris) and allow the host city to choose three special guest sports per Games. These should have some connection with the host. Petanque and smoking should be at these Games, just as sumo and Total Wipeout should have featured in Japan.
Seems unfair that there are 37 medals available for swimmers and only two for modern pentathletes. Okay swimming has different strokes (for different folks) but is there really any need to see them across all those distances then again in medley form? Cap everything except athletics at 10 medals each.
A niche but serious gripe at this Games. Since Tokyo 1964 each Games has provided pictograms, icon-sized visual representations of each sport. They were brought in for that Olympics as so few visitors would have understood Japanese but remain a helpful tool for signposting on everything from websites to, er, signposts. This year’s, unfortunately, are an impenetrable disgrace. The aim was “to create a rupture and revolutionise the forms”, according to organisers. The rupture is too successful, because all of the graphics are as instantly understandable as cryptic crossword clues.
As with much of public life, we can learn a lot from Eurovision here. The song contest forces contestants to adhere to a three-minute limit for entries and clearly no opening ceremony should take longer than two hours. If that means putting the parade of athletes on E-scooters to speed them up then so be it. The closing ceremony should be 45-minutes at an absolute maximum and ideally so unobtrusive that most of it happens behind an absorbing Clare Balding and Michael Johnson studio discussion about middle distance tactics.
The current trend is inoffensive anthropomorphism, which begets the Phryges, this Olympics’ unsettling tongue-like nothing-creature haunting the dreams of children. Tokyo had a robot, Rio a LOL-worthy “hybrid animal representing all Brazilian mammals,” and London the desperate Wenlock, “A drop of steel with a camera for an eye.” Recognisable animals from hereon in, and you’re only allowed two, one for the Olympics, one for the Paralympics.
The most likeable thing Cristiano Ronaldo ever did was remove those bottles of Coca Cola from the camera’s field of vision in a Euro 2020 press conference. It is Gatorade on the tables here, which feels cheeky. Only accepting official sponsor Visa for card transactions is also highly petty behaviour which makes everyone feel like that guy who insists on trying to pay for everything in the UK with American Express, with a success rate of below 10 per cent.
The 2012 and 2016 Games gave British viewers a glorious taste of the broadcasting future. Any sport, any time, online or behind a suddenly popular red button. Since the full rights package moved to Eurosport non-subscribers wishing to watch, say, the volleyball now have to hope they catch a glimpse on the BBC’s compilation programmes. While coverage of the Games is part of the Ofcom crown jewels list, this does not guarantee viewers the full all-you-can-eat buffet of sport which we gorged upon for two glorious summers. Time for Sir Keir Starmer to concentrate on something really important and fix this injustice.