If you seriously think that there is even a tiny chance of fencing ever continuously bringing in even half as much viewers as football, I don't know what to tell you. The uncertainty there is not weather report level, more like "the sun will rise tomorrow".
As a counterpoint, I bet if you had told people a thousand years ago that swordsmanship would be less interesting to people than kicking a ball, they would also think you were crazy.
Well if you extended it to "weaponsmanship" then that's still the case. People are fascinated by guns and bombs and other modern (or fantasy) weapons, which is why they show up copiously in movies.
Olympic fencing is straight up dumb - they do the equivalent of immediately charging to their deaths with a goofy flexi-"sword". If you want some real entertainment in that area watch HEMA fencing.
Your perception of Fencing and HEMA aside; I can promise you that if HEMA was an Olympic sport: * The same money problems that Fencing athletes face would apply to potential 'HEMA athletes'. * You would hate what HEMA becomes because now it's a sport that people try to win at, with the 'realism' aspect all but destroyed.
Yeah there still wouldn't be much money in it, it's pretty niche, and would probably only grow the viewership slightly. But at least it wouldn't be dumb.
It's fine when Sports Illustrated does it- that's a legitimate publication that will subtly hide the most interesting bits and retain all the money from advertising and sales. When an athlete does it directly and retains the money themselves, that's a disgrace.
Athletes seem to appear in Playboy fairly often. eg Dutch skater Joy Beune was in the December 2024 issue ( in Dutch Playboy and possibly other countries )
Olympic fencing is straight up dumb - they do the equivalent of immediately charging to their deaths with a goofy flexi-"sword". If you want some real entertainment in that area watch HEMA fencing.
Yea I always thought it was a bit silly that the method for winning was charging at your opponent and stabbing them a hundredth of a second before they stab you. As a person who knows nothing about fencing besides watching it on TV at the olympics once I think they should change the rules where it's not who stabs who first, but who stabs the other without getting stabbed themselves.
Right, if you get stabbed you lose points, so the people who win both stabbed good and also didn't get stabbed. Whole dynamic of the sport would change and would actually look closer to in the movies.
Olympic fencing is straight up dumb - they do the equivalent of immediately charging to their deaths with a goofy flexi-"sword". If you want some real entertainment in that area watch HEMA fencing.
I know where the argument comes from, but at an extreme watching football with 22 folks running behind a ball in a slow game where 97% of the time nothing happens in terms of scoring, and in terms of tactics, today sounds like a handball game; it's boring (and I say that as a Brazilian and having attended more than 100+ in the stadium and more than 600 on TV). The entertainment in the Olympic games is in the fact tha…
What you say sounds logical, but it's nevertheless observably obviously wrong, and that's what's important. All the figures bear out that people find football more entertaining than extreme feats. Maybe they like the slow pace and tension as it's more relatable to their own lives, or because the lulls in action allow some socializing or whatever. Otherwise they'd spend their weekends watching hours of shark wrestling…
Or, hear me out, it's purely a cultural thing. Some communities are into hockey, wrestling, soccer, football etc. You could say the same thing about ski jumping, yet it's extremely popular in a few EU countries and pretty well funded. AFAIU barely anyone gave a shit about gymnastics in the US before Biles - if we have pipelines for young athletes to succeed, their sports can absolutely become regionally popular, sufficiently for them to be self sustainable through direct sponsorships.
System working as designed? Like, if your hobby is throwing a disc as far as you can, have fun. But don't expect many people to pay to watch right? But people pay a whole lot to see nice bodies doing sexual stuff. So since money comes from what other people value, no need for a surprised Pikachu face.
Well the IOC makes an enormous amount of money that has to come from somewhere. That is a reflection of the demand. Tickets are extremely expensive and the deals for live broadcast also involve huge amounts of money, which broadcasters wouldn't pay if they didn't think many would watch. The point of this article is simply that a bigger fraction of that money should go to the athletes. They are prevented in various wa…
These days I start to think (US) college sports, as bad as they are for many reasons, are much better than the Olympics, in the sense that at least athletes don't need to worry about being able to afford the training.
Fencing as done now looks legit stupid, so does racewalking. Javelin, while slightly more cool, is you throwing a stick. Mildly interesting for a few seconds. Football is a top tier sport because it's entertaining. People will pay to see it. Hence there's money to be earned. If someone wants to spend their time seeing how far they can throw a stick, cool, but they shouldn't be surprised they're waking up to an empty…
> Football is a top tier sport because it's entertaining. Some dudes running and kicking a ball from left to right for 90+ minutes? They’re not even allowed to fight… From all the sports this is certainly one of the most boring ones.
I don't watch it either, tedious unless got skin in the result, but my tastes aren't the public's.
Would be great if they wound back all the dainty fouls stuff though. Bring back two leg slide tackles etc. But they did all that precisely because the sport got so popular - costs of multi million dollar players getting legs broken wasn't acceptible.