In this episode of the Fanalytics podcast, Mike Lewis, a marketing professor at Emory University, discusses the significance and future prospects of the Olympics. He examines the recent Paris 2024 Olympics, highlighting both its successes and challenges. Key points include the doubling of viewership for the opening ceremony compared to the Tokyo games, but the overall decline in viewership compared to past decades. Lewis delves into the politics interwoven with the event, touching on controversies like the Drag Queen Last Supper and LeBron James as flag bearer. He stresses the potential of the Olympics to create niche stars in less popular sports, while questioning the balance between leveraging established stars like LeBron James and fostering new Olympic legends. Finally, the episode hints at broader discussions on politics in fandom, to be covered in future episodes.
Analyzing the Paris 2024 Olympics: Success, Politics, and Future of Fandom
In this episode of the Fanalytics podcast, Professor Mike Lewis from Emory University explores the impact and future of the Paris 2024 Olympics. Delving into the opening and closing ceremonies, viewership statistics, and memorable moments, Mike assesses whether the games were a success and how they fit into the evolving landscape of sports fandom. He highlights the mix of politics and sports, the creation of niche stars, and the contrast between leveraging well-known celebrities versus nurturing new Olympic legends. The episode also teases an upcoming discussion on political fandom and its cultural ramifications.
00:00 Introduction to Fanalytics Podcast
00:29 The Significance of the Olympics
01:54 Analyzing the 2024 Paris Olympics
05:21 Historical Context and Olympic Narratives
09:03 Memorable Moments from the 2024 Games
14:55 Key Takeaways from the Paris Olympics
23:30 Conclusion and Upcoming Topics
Okay, everyone. Welcome to the Fanalytics podcast. My name's Mike Lewis. I'm a professor of marketing at Emory university and I study fandomanalytics.com and really lately. What I'm interested in is getting it the future of fandom. So our fandoms is critical concept. It really. Dictates the world. We live in the, the personality of the world we live in. And so where this is all going. Incredibly important.
And part of this. We recently finished the Olympics. And the Olympics has long been one of these marquee sports events, right. Something that absolutely captured the attention of the world for two or three weeks, every four years. Right. So the Olympics has always been this massive spectacle, something that is. You know, feels like an institution, not a commercial enterprise, like an institution. That we should pay attention to something, something that reflects the purity of sports, right.
That's always been the, the Olympics brand. So we finished the Paris 20, 24 Olympics. And so before I get into some observations from the games, Talk a little bit about the economics. Okay. And look in some ways. The opening and closing ceremonies of this Olympics were. Perfect. In term perfect reflections of what's going on with the Olympics at the moment. At the very beginning, we had some political controversies related to, uh, the drag queen.
Last supper. We'll call it. Uh, at the end, we had Tom cruise, skydiving. Repelling into the Olympic arena. And then a video production showing him. I think jumping over the Hollywood sign, the Hollywood sign was also enhanced to have the two owners as part of the Olympic rings. Okay. So first question is. We're the Elim.
And again, I, I, I mentioned these things because it shows how the Olympics are really embedded in popular culture at the moment. So the first question. Where the Olympics of success. Okay. So one of the things that tends to get looked at with the Olympics or the opening ceremony numbers, right? It's something that's relatively, relatively clean.
Right? Look, the Olympics are all over the place. We got table tennis. We got basketball. We got soccer. We got shooting. Um, it's on four or five different NBC channels. It's on the, I think the peacock streaming service. Right. So it's hard to do an apple to apple comparison of the Olympics. The number of events also has grown essentially over each Olympics game Olympic games. So looking at opening ceremony, numbers, viewership doubled. Uh, for the Paris games relative to the Tokyo games. Um, another another, so it seems like it's something. Something pretty significant.
Now it's a funny comparison, right? And a lot of the news stories are written that the Olympics were a glowing success. I think it's probably a little bit more nuanced or a little bit more mixed. Okay. So the opening ceremony is double in terms of viewership. Uh, Tokyo was at 16.7. Paris was at 28.6.
So the headlines are, you know, almost being a little bit embellished right off the bat. Right. It didn't quite double. Now, if you go farther back though. This is where it gets kind of interesting in, in sort of a longer-term perspective. Atlanta was 39.8, I think. So just about 40 million. So when you think about. Really 40 million in 1996.
And look, I should put some caveats on this, right. Showing it in Atlanta is better than showing it in Paris because of the time zones. Right. Okay. So there are some, there's probably also going to be some more excitement, some more marketing because it's on us soil. But abstracting away from that stuff. The Atlanta games was about 40 million viewers.
So this, this wasn't a country with 270 million people. That's about 15% of Americans watching. 15% of the country doing everything at the same time. It's an incredibly big deal now. Less of a big deal back in, in 96, when we were all watching network TV and cable TV. Um, Now in 2024 with a population of 337 million. That percentage that watched the Paris opening games had dropped to just 8.5% of the U S population. So it's a mixed bag in terms of the story, right?
The Olympics has always been this societal unifier, right? We all get together. We all watch the Olympics, like with a lot of sports, like we all get together. We all watch Wimbledon. We all watch the Indy 500. We all watched the world series. One of these type of events. But like all those other things I just mentioned. The Olympics is playing less of that role. So 15% in 1996, down to eight and a half percent in 2024. But in the context of what's been happening recently in like Tokyo. Was really a trouble games had to be postponed a couple of times. Uh, there was a COVID hangover. But it's a, it's a mixed bag in terms of what's going on with the Olympics. At the moment. Okay, when I think about the Olympics, my starting point, well, like when I think about any sports fandom, my starting point is thinking about the foundational stories. So the foundational narratives. And for the Olympics, They're very strong. They're very strong at foundational elements, right? The Olympics have national teams.
So there's a point of national pride. The Olympics are also, despite that they're almost always used for political purposes. The Olympics are about the purity of sports. The world's nations coming together. Putting aside conflicts and politics to engage in reaching the heights of human capabilities. The Olympics also have a long, long history.
I mean, and look, I'm not going to claim to know what the events were in ancient Greece, but it seems like they have their heritage in track and field. And I suspect if you go back to when they started the Olympics up again, and I think, uh, 1896 in Greece, somewhere in that, that neighborhood, it was probably very much track and field heavy.
So the Olympic stories, and again, you know, I think it's, it's, it's an interesting exercise to think through what the Olympic narratives are for different generations. Um, looking in the history books, American Olympic history, you have folks like Jesse Owens, 1936 Olympics, defeating, defeating Hitler, right?
Beating the Aryan the Aryan ideal athlete concept. Uh, in the 1960s, you've got Cassius Clay, later Muhammad Ali, you have the Olympic, um, the protest, the podium protest in 1968 from the American sprinters. You have, and again, sort of moving forward over time. When I get to my era. I tend to think about the 1976 Olympics as being the first one on the radar.
Bruce Jenner being the world's greatest athlete later on the Wheaties boxes. Um, the Mary Lou Reddin in 1984, remember we missed 1980 on the summer side because of the Moscow boycott. 1980 and the Lake Placid games, we had the miracle on ice. Uh, Larry, Mary Lou Redden in 1984, Carl Lewis and some of the American track athletes in 1988, Edwin Moses, Jackie Joyner Kersee, right, and again, and again, as you proceed through the ages and you get to, you know, newer people, like the younger folks, their Olympic memories might be Michael Phelps from Olympics, a couple Olympics ago, um, now you've got Simone Biles.
Right? So the Olympics has always been built on these athletes that. Breakthrough. Right? It's just three weeks and they go from being almost unknown to breaking through and being part of, and in some cases like a permanent part of American sports lore, of American sports culture. So, when I think about the Olympics, I think in terms of what are they accomplishing.
What did the 2024 Olympics do in terms of strengthening the overall Olympic narratives? And I will admit that I've got a little bit of a bias in this, or at least a perspective, that I tend to think the Olympics are better served when their stars come from the core sports, the core Olympic sports, the track and field.
Swimming, gymnastics, the sports that are really only featured during the Olympic Games, rather than the, the, the sports where, you know, soccer, basketball, where the athletes come in for a short time to, to win a medal. Okay, so when I think about the 2024 game, my short list of, of moments, memorable moments include, number one, The Opening Ceremony Drag Queen Last Supper.
Totally unforced mistake, right? And you, it's like a lot of cultural entities that are influenced by the politics of the people putting them on. Very clearly. Going to be offensive to Christians watching the games, um, for the sake of inclusivity, I guess. But the problem is it's really not clear how we get to inclusivity from that type of display.
So they're interjecting politics, but without a clear rationale for, for doing so. And a very debatable, um, case for including it at all. Uh, LeBron James being the U. S. flag bearer. Aside from James being an occasionally political figure, I tend to think the flag bearer should probably be someone from one of the core sports, right?
LeBron James was already famous. And again, this LeBron James selection as the flag bearer highlights one of the, one of the dilemmas for the Olympics or sort of one of the challenges. LeBron James is going to bring a massive audience. But he's not an Olympics guy, right? He's an NBA guy. He's a basketball guy.
The Olympics, you know, probably the headliners for the Olympic team were Katie Ledecky and Simone Biles. Um, Caitlin Clark not being included in the U. S. Women's Olympic basketball team. Again, kind of, uh, you know, we get into sort of some of the background noise on the conflicts within the WNBA, but what a missed opportunity.
Okay, Alona Mare, Alona Mare, running over the competition in women's rugby. This, to me, is what's great about the Olympics. When we, and I know she, she broke through in, uh, the Tokyo games as well. But when suddenly you've got a unique, physical, um, Specimen. A unique athlete, I think she's five foot 10, 200 pounds, and doing things that we don't normally see.
So women's rugby great for the Olympics in that we get some new exposure and we get something, something different. Maybe even a little bit quirky. She followed up with a ton of work on social media. So one of the real stars of the games, uh, Simone Biles winning. Gold medal after medal, after metal really cementing her place as an Olympic legend.
And so just those those first two names, right, someone relatively unknown doing something interesting and then someone real building out kind of these core Olympic legends Noah Lyles winning 100 meters. Bring this world's fastest man title back to the States. I think this is potentially really a big thing.
The 100 meters might be the most pure Olympic event, right? Who can run the fastest? So Lyle should be a major star. I tend to think Lyle's personality is a little bit self defeating. You know, you gotta remember he was the guy out there going after the NBA guys for claiming to have won the world championship.
Yeah. World Championship of the NBA. So I don't think he, you know, he doesn't execute well in terms of building his own brand. Uh, Jason Tate, not playing in the men's basketball game. Okay, again, kind of an interesting one. Major NBA star. The story became that he wasn't playing. Right? Not a core Olympic event.
These NBA players taking time out of their summer schedule. He doesn't deserve to be embarrassed. Right? So it again highlights something, something paradoxical about the Olympic Games. And when major stars come into it, they attract viewers, but they also distract, uh, Steven Nedorosic, helping the men's team win gymnastics medal as a pommel horse specialist.
Okay, so again, kind of like Mayor. We don't know this guy. He's kind of quirky looking, wears glasses, just comes in for a sort of strange event. He could be definitely the answer to a trivia question. So a great Olympic, uh, moment. Uh, Giorgia Via, Italy. Okay, love this story. Mainly I'm focusing on Americans, but she went viral after I think she won a silver medal.
Primarily because she was sponsored by Parmigiano Reggiano. So she was sponsored by Cheese and people, social media love this kind of story. So great gymnast sponsored by cheese. I love it because it really encapsulates what the Olympics is about. The Olympics in a lot of ways is an ad platform. Almost every high level athlete is sponsored.
Um, the reason for the games, the reason the games have such great production values and such so much attention is because there are so many sponsors in the background that want to reach a global audience and guess what? Parmigiano Reggiana. Used an Italian gymnast to reach a global audience. Uh, US Men's Basketball, winning gold, led by LeBron James and Stephen Curry.
Okay, so, The Olympics leveraging this NBA stardom to get a pop in the ratings. Um, but when we think about these guys longterm, do we think about them as Olympians or do we think about them as NBA greats and the last one, social media, having a field day with the breaking competition. Now the woman Ray Gunn.
You know, the more we learned, the more, the, the thing I kept thinking is like, this is pure peak academia. So someone with a PhD in dance culture or breakdancing creates a commission, staffs it with her husband, basically selects herself, and then goes out as an Olympian. And embarrasses herself, and embarrasses the sport or art to the degree where breaking has been dropped from the L.
A., will not be part of the L. A. games. Okay, so my four insights or takeaways from the Paris games. Number one, too much politics. Politics and sports are almost always a bad idea. It's, it's almost inevitable that the games will become politicized. I mean, like, one of the major features of the games is that you've got national teams. It gives the games a tremendous built in advantage, and it's got a ready made fan base.
The Americans know who to root for, the UK folks know who to root for, the Ecuadorians know who to root for, the Chinese know who to root for. But, The more political you get, look, and look, there, I think the Russian athletes were banned again from, were banned again from this game, that the more political these things get, you're going to lose a little bit of luster from the overall brand.
Now, I'm also, look, I'm good with the argument that it doesn't seem to matter. So, with this games, right, the, the Drag Queen Last Supper was a tempest for the first, you know, call it 24, 48 hours in the games. It does not appear to have had any lasting impact on viewership though. Okay. So people are offended.
But at least people, like there's an interesting thing going on culturally. I think a lot of times when right wing people are offended, there tends to be less of a, less of a pushback. Um, Bud Light is probably the one exception to that, but, you know, kneeling controversies in the NFL didn't dampen viewership or attendance appreciably.
And so we didn't see that with the Olympics. But I think, you know, at a deeper level, when we're thinking about the long term impact on the branding, instituting or, you know, creating more political controversy is probably almost always going to be a bad idea. And like I said, at the, at the top of the, going through some of the, the memorable moments, it's an unforced error.
Right? It's directly offensive to Christians, um, but it's really not clear what it's getting you on the, on the other side. Okay? So that's number one. Number two. This Olympics did what the Olympics does best, and that's create niche stars. All right, so the Olympics has all these different sports. I think it's 36 sports, and that's, that's an underestimate because, you know, there's two kinds of volleyball.
There's two kinds of volleyball. There's, um, you know, multiple, two kinds of wrestling. So when I think about the new stars, and I covered them, right, Alana Mayer and Steven Nedorosic. This is what the Olympics do best. We don't watch pommel horse competitions. For Right? We don't watch women's rugby, but then suddenly these things take center stage.
I think the Winter Olympics, you know, the greatest example of this is suddenly we're fixated by curling, right? So suddenly we all come together. We now all know the pommel horse guy. Most people have probably already forgotten his name. It pommel horse guy, but they become. Part of the, part of the legend, right? So part of the foundational stories of the games.
Okay, number three, and I could say this about any games, but I think this becomes more and more true for every sport in every iteration. Sports have largely become advertising platforms, and they're more and more operated as such. I mentioned the Italian gymnast. She became a great story because suddenly the advertising was was out front.
But like I said, almost everything at the Olympics, every person, every venue, every event has a sponsorship. So you really have to think through, are the sponsors, and look, I think very often people don't talk sponsors anymore, they want to use the word partners. I think that's very true in the case of the Olympics.
The Olympics are a partnership between the brands and the games and the athletes to basically put out the message for a bunch of products on a global basis. So the numbers I gave you at the beginning about the opening ceremony, these were U. S. numbers. I've seen other estimates that the Olympics reaches 3 billion people globally.
So there's very, very few ways to reach a global mass audience and the Olympics is one of them. The other one is probably Fifa Soccer. I'm not sure what number three is. You know, perhaps, perhaps something like F1, but the Olympics are truly built for marketing at this point. Uh, some of the key sponsors, Coca Cola, Intel, Toyota, right?
So their logos are everywhere. Across, across the games. Um, and like I said, this is very true for just a luck. The think about something like the Superbowl, the Superbowl sets a record every year for a 32nd ad block, right? The purpose of the game the way the game makes money is by putting out by attracting a mass audience and then showing people and then showing people brands.
Okay, number four. And this is, this is the kind of opinion that I would, you know, I'll take a little heat for. When I think about the Olympics, I always question whether or not they're getting, they're getting the balance right between leveraging non Olympic stars versus building more Olympic stars. So LeBron James.
LeBron James is great as, uh, for someone in sports marketing to think about. Because LeBron James has a massive fan base. You know, maybe 200 million followers on a platform like Instagram, I think 185 million, but LeBron also has a massive number of haters, right? If you want to go viral with a post. Say something about LeBron, right?
Because it's sort of set up for. The comments section to have people agreeing with you going after LeBron and then people going after you for going after LeBron. Right? So someone like that brings a massive audience. Steph Curry also brings a really significant audience. The International soccer players.
Bring massive audiences. So for the Olympics, I want to hit my numbers. I want to get 30 million people watching in the U S for the opening ceremony. I got to put that flag in LeBron's hands, right? Cause people will tune in to see LeBron, Simone Biles. Um, and so I, like I intentionally named two people there, two people, one really kind of a core Olympian and one more of an MBA guy, but in the longterm, what's best for the games?
I think U. S. athletes, you know, because of national pride, they like to go out and win a couple of gold medals in multiple Olympics. It's something that helps them build their resume, but their resumes and their brands are primarily built through NBA championships. Simone Biles resume is primarily built through the Olympic Games.
And so I will always question. If they get the balance right, because from this Olympic game, maybe the most memorable moment, the most memorable team was LeBron and Steph Curry winning the gold medal. It was, unfortunately for the games, it wasn't Noah Lyle becoming the world's fastest man. Um, I suspect at the end of the day, it was the men's basketball team is star one, and Simone Biles was star two or maybe one A and one B.
I think if you're the Olympic Games, you want to develop stars throughout every games, right? You want to develop two or three household names, because you got to sustain this going forward getting to the next Olympic Games. And I just don't know that the Olympics is Great at doing that anymore. I just don't think there's a, Hey, this is the world's greatest athlete, Bruce Jenner, now he's on the Wheaties box, or Hey, this is America's sweetheart, Mary Lou Redden.
You know, we, we aren't seeing these kinds of stars develop as consistently as they did in the past break.
Okay, I'm gonna wrap it there. It's, um, like I said, the Olympics are a, um, the Olympics are a great sports spectacle. They're also a great litmus test or temperature check in terms of what's going on in the world of sports. Uh, the Olympics are absolutely driven by impressions, and that leads them to make, uh, Decisions that may conflict with building the type of really core Olympic passionate fandom that will sustain the games for decades and decades.
It's this general shift away from core sports fandom to almost more of an entertainment orientation. So the Olympics are a great thing to watch, especially because now they happen every once every four years. So it's a very. Quick three week period that we can get a sense of how the world is viewing a sports property.
Okay guys, um, one thing I want to note, well, next week we're going to change the topic and dig into some of the ramifications of political fandom as the Kamala Harris and Donald Trump race really heats up. Gonna look at some material related to Both political fandom for the two candidates and who, who the fans of Trump are fans of in the celebrity sense and who the fans of Kamala are in a celebrity sports entertainment music sense too.
Cause I think this is one way to really kind of paint a picture of where society's at and how this election fits into the general culture. The other thing I want to note. Is that for those of you who are on social, I'm spending a lot more time on places like TikTok and YouTube. I'll put the handles in the, in the show notes.
Uh, I tend to think about what I do as occurring in layers. So there's a substack fan analytics substack.com that is more for longer form. Essays. I think of the podcast as more of a conversational approach to the issues of fandom, future fandom, fandom analytics. But social media, YouTube, primarily YouTube Shorts, Instagram and TikTok are very much geared towards quick soundbites.
So I'm doing a lot of work where looking at the topics of the day and giving a perspective, usually some numbers, some theory, in one minute chunks. So, you know, please check those out.