Ask HN: What caused the Olympics to become so terrible?

When I was a kid, we use to look forward to the Olympics. It was a big deal. The whole family would gather around the TV to watch the events live regardless of timezone. We use to follow the stories of the atheletes and it was constantly the talk of the town.

Nowadays, it kind of feels like Olympics are just annoying. Propaganda fest for authoritarian regimes. No one cares. Heck, some people don’t even know that the Olympics are even happening.

How did it go so wrong?

Assuming you're in the USA: NBC bought the exclusive rights for coverage in the USA (through 2032), and what gets shown, and when, and with what commentary, reflects their priorities.

Edit: I just found a fascinating detail on the Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NBC_Olympic_broadcasts#Mike_Ti... which points out that NBC doesn't want Olympics coverage to cannibalize their Super Bowl viewership, which is more profitable.

The model of "go to a new place every four years, build an Olympic village and a bunch of athletic facilities" doesn't work economically. It doesn't make enough money in the short term, and the facilities don't get enough use in the long term to justify it either.

That makes it hard for a city in a free society to want to be the host. The costs are very real but the benefits are elusive. Probably the last time the Olympics were profitable to the host city was the 1984 Los Angeles games and that was because Los Angeles was able to drive a hard bargain because nobody wanted to host the Olympics after the terrorism at the 1972 games.

Some people have suggested we might be better off if the Olympics were held in the same place(s) every year, maybe in Greece.

I’ve noticed the same thing, and I think it’s for a couple of reasons:

As noted in another comment NBC is an absolutely terrible steward of the broadcasts in the US, but they spent the money to help prop up their football investment.

The second is that the IOC is driven by greed, and dictatorships have money while craving any legitimacy they can get on the world stage. It’s been shown in multiple studies (sorry I don’t have time to look them up offhand) that only a few cities have managed to pivot the Olympics required investment into a profit by any measure (including public good, which is where I recall the few that are considered successes hinge their measurements, i.e. LA). That drives the actual Olympics into those countries arms.