I’m pretty sure people uninterested in the things that interest you would say the same thing.

wasting time on something you enjoy is not actually wasted time. Besides, so many people get positivity from watching etc

Honestly, not to be mean or anything, BUT, this sorta reeks of "I don't like it so nobody else should."

This is a type of mentality that I believe to be highly negative and frankly kinda toxic. Your welcome to your opinion, but I really don't think the many many hours, days, weeks, months, and years of effort, training and planning that goes into those who both run and participate in the Olympics is a waste of time and effort.

Also we live in a world that you can just block or ignore anything you don't particularly care for.

I believe there is a lot of positive reasons to have the Olympics. It’s a symbol of peace. Nations joining together in the spirit of competition to send their best athletes to compete. Culture is shared. Cities hosting it put their best foot forward. Everyone comes together.

As far as the negatives. The amount of money and work required to host is getting out of hand. They should seriously pair back the amount of competitions. I just freaking watched break dancing. Seriously? Dressage? Should we just cut to the chase and award medals to the horses? Maybe we stick to athletic human sports and drop some of the frivolity, or artistic endeavors where judges are required to decide style points when a stopwatch or a tape measure should do. The sheer amount of resources required to support this bloating competition has gotten out of hand.

While I certainly believe many sports events are really just a waste of money, Olympics is probably not.

Not only does it serve as a way to promote sports worldwide, boosting public health and inspiring people, it also is a remarkable feat of international cooperation, contributing to the relative peace and harmony.

Now, all those football leagues and stuff should really vanish. They cost way more than their benefit could ever be.

For the athletes, it's a not a waste of time and effort.

For the hosting countries/cities?

They cost a TON of time and money, and it's a dubious proposition that the host cities ever recover that investment. Olympic villages are also rarely the best possible use of prime land, and often involve buying up and gentrifying entire neighborhoods for the purpose of building the facilities, and for the duration of the event, and the planning leading up to it, your city basically gives up autonomy to an organization that spends your resources as if they were their own in order to create a platform to sell advertising rights in the guise of sportsmanship. For the Olympics to be more sustainable and less corrupted by commercial interests, they should focus less on spectacle and expenditure and rely more on existing infrastructure.

Furthermore, while sport is an important and noble endeavor, it is by no means any more important than any other human endeavor, and every four years we have to be exposed to the intersection of sports and politics in discussions about nations that, for example, allow medalists to avoid conscription or escape poverty in various countries in exchange for bringing national prestige, and rarely do we take the opportunity to discuss what this says about our priorities, simply accepting the elevated prestige we place on this particular sporting event without question.

In short, I don't agree their cancellation would cause NOTHING of value to be lost, but the Olympics as an event in its current incarnation has PLENTY worth reevaluating, and we could all benefit greatly from reexamining its scale and role.

It's a drain on resources intended to boost the prestige of a nation-state and the vile, self-serving elites that control them. The IOC itself is a corrupt bribe-machine that willingly bolsters the reputation of the worst regimes in the world.

It's the circuses part of 'bread and circuses' - a tool of oppressers the world over.

It's not even a fair competition. How rich a country is and how much they spend on sport and sport science is the largest determining factor in medal count. Just another way for the evil to buy legitimacy.

There are many reasons to oppose the Olympics, but that the athletes are wasting their time and effort is not one of them

Upvoted because this is definitely an unpopular opinion

I love the idea of the Olympics and would like to see a version that wasn't an environmental, economic, and humanitarian trash fire.

LA's transit plans are all aiming for a 2028 Olympics launch. If it was not for that, I doubt any of these projects could get the funding in time.

My similar opinion is that Americans could have Universal healthcare for a decade if they gave up the money they spend on football for just one year. NFL. College ball, etc.

my unpopular opinion is that they are a waste of time and effort.

Let's go further and remove Soccer, American Football, Basketball, Hockey and other sports.

All of that is IMO a waste of time, with no value /s

The sports and competition are not. Will my kids ever be Olympic athletes? Probably not. But there's been a hell of a lot of pretending going on at my house the past month, and I like that.

Is moving the Olympics ever 4 years and building bigger, more elaborate facilities purely as a dick measuring contest a waste of time and effort? Absolutely, 100%.

They should just pick a location and stick to it. Same with the World Cup.

Globally your position is extremely popular.

I have, if anything, been watching the Olympics more now than in the past. I think the change came about due to the fact that you can now stream any event at any time without commercials, annoying commentary, interviews, etc. It used to be that coverage would focus on events featuring your own nation's top talent, which meant that some sport that interests you but doesn't have much traction in your country gets ignored. And during a low time, rather than showing some sport where maybe your country has no medal prospects, they'd fill the time doing athlete profiles or whatever. I hated that.

But I get that there are downsides. The cost of hosting the games have spiralled out of control, the IOC has FIFA-scale corruption issues, and the war on drugs is going about as well as wars on drugs go.

One thing I have noticed with the Paris Games is that the venues are spread around a lot more across the country. The surfing was all the way over in Tahiti, which is about as far from Paris as you can get and still be on the planet. This opens the possibility that maybe one nation, let alone city, need not supply every facility anymore. Like do we really need another luge track? Just pick one that already exists.

I'd agree except that the possibility remains to just build a permanent site to host both the summer and winter games, removing like 99% of the negatives that it actually causes.

Think of it as a prototype of a better form of complex social hierarchy, and an expansion of human thought.

Our primary form of hierarchical display is wealth. Future peoples will reflect on this as a most primitive barbarism. This form of display places fundamental human needs of survival opposite the fulcrum of social hierarchy. Even at a fundamental level, this form of display is primitive nonsense, as it is largely dominated by hereditary factors instead of individual merit. This system is a major incumbrance of progress, placing incompetent persons in prominent roles of society based solely on inheritance.

The Olympics is a far better prototype of a complex meritocracy and regulating structure.

The other primary forms of hierarchy can be seen in academia's reputation and accolades, and in The Academy Awards of Merit.

Sometimes I feel this way too, most of the competitions don't interest me much.

One benefit that does happen is it spurs mass public transit expansion (Peertube version) big time in the host city. The sheer volume of athletes and visitors to one area means that your usual 1 hour or more commutes on already congested roads aren't going to cut it.

This event makes a city/country get off their ass, stop being complacent. It makes a convincing case for deficit spending to meet public infrastructure needs, which are so often neglected when left alone.

I would have no problem with a few internationally funded standardized Olympic facilities with rotating hosts that offer their nations cuisine and hospitality to the games.

Sort of a reverse tourism thing.

Definitely unpopular.

However, I mostly agree with you.

I still like the idea of the Olympics in the way it's marketed to be, a time of peaceful athletic competition and communication between nations and peoples.

And, I can't lie, it is one of the few times that individual sports that I'm more into watching ever get air time at all. Like, you don't see judo, or archery, or shooting, or even wrestling on regular tv often at all, even back when I still had cable. Team sports, you can see all damn day, all times of the year, but individual sports don't usually have the same kind of industry built around them.

Which, that's part of the problem, the way some sports turn into a money making machine rather than a genuine competition for sport's sake.

But, yeah, I get tired of the masturbatory commentary, the circle jerk nature of opening ceremonies, the back room bullshit of how it's all arranged and located. It's a shit ton of resources better allocated to actually making things better instead of entertaining the masses.

Basically all professional sports.

I believe sports should be done for fun and exercise. Not as a professional career.

Almost nothing good comes from professionally played sports. It only brings the worst of human beings.

It's not that they are merely a waste of time. They are harmful. This is not what amateur sports should look like! I think everyone kind of realizes that. This is a bunch of bullshit nationalism and capitalism exploiting athletes and their fans. We would not lose amateur sports if the Olympic organization went bankrupt.

You could say the same to your favourite sporting events like MMA, Superbowl, Euro Finals, Copa America, and even e-sports, etc.

I can see where you're coming from but the Olympics is a healthy way for countries to compete with each other, instead of going on battlefields. Like the other poster mentioned, the Olympics promote international cooperation. For example, even though China is getting a bad rap in international politics, their athletes have notably been professional and wholesome which boost their country's image.

I also think that the high prestigious image of the Olympics will inspire more people to pursue sports; regardless of whether or not they will want to compete in the event. It's still good to be healthy!

Whats wrong with some entertaining sports? You don't have to watch it. But millions of people want to.

Just like Superbowl.