Photo: Gorodenkoff (Shutterstock)
Did you know that the Summer Olympics include canoeing, BMX racing, handball, trampoline and judo competitions? Maybe you didn’t, but fans of these sports definitely do, and you might run into these big brains and have to play along.
It’s hard to keep track of all the events and key players in a major event that happens every four years – or five years after the last in this case – but it’s still the hot topic of the next few days, so you have to at least try to counterfeit. Pretend you know what’s going on at the Olympics – or some other major sporting event that you haven’t been watching.
Become a morning tv
Millennials and Gen Zers are cable cutters, we already know that, but there is an advantage to being someone who watches TV in the mornings while the Olympics are taking place: NBC’s Today is all over coverage as NBC has American rights to it.
Since the Olympics are held in Japan and there is a significant time difference, the morning show has a duty to reveal all events overnight. Use this to your advantage. Morning TV is all about feel-good content, so you can get updates on medals and interviews with American athletes’ parents, even if you dedicate just a few of your precious morning moments to this mission. Parent interviews are especially useful when you’re trying to get a set of biographical facts about an athlete you’ve just heard about. If you look at just part of this coverage, you can find out where they are from, how they got into their sport and what they enjoy doing besides training and generally being a beast in the ring or on the court or … whatever .
Use Twitter to your advantage
Keep an eye out for Twitter trends at any major event – for example, when a movie trailer is released, when the Video Music Awards is up and, yes, when the Olympics are on, where the trend list tells you the basics of what you need to know with to keep up with the conversation.
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When an American athlete does well or badly, he is trending. It is really that easy. Most of the time, a nice soul on Twitter will write a little blurb about the trend so you don’t even have to click on someone’s name to find out what sport they are playing or why they are causing so much buzz.
Sometimes the athletes tend for reasons other than their performance. Be prepared for these cases – for example when Sha’Carri Richardson was prevented from competing this year because it tested positive for THC or when Simone Biles said goodbye this week and cited mental health concerns – because you don’t need to know somber sports details to participate in cultural discourse. If you have opinions about weed or mental health, it’s easy to talk about even if you don’t know how fast Richardson runs or which gymnastics maneuvers Biles is best known for.
Find out about the Olympics the old fashioned way
If you’re headed to a sports bar to meet your Olympic-obsessed friends and need immediate help, stick with Twitter trends. However, if you have some time to read up on the event, do read up.
There’s a reason people go crazy every four years: the Olympics are interesting and fun. The athletes can be adorable or intimidating, the stats can blow your mind, and it’s cool to learn about topics you normally don’t think about for almost half a decade. In those four years you didn’t think about any obscure sport, a handful of athletes thought about it non-stop. They worked really hard for this so you can learn a thing or two from all of their efforts.
Since the Olympics are such a big deal, the media prepare the coverage months in advance and call on their brightest minds to do so. Go to the homepage of any outlet and browse through it.
“My advice would be to read the tweets or the work of smart people,” said Dakota Schmidt, a Basketball author from Wisconsin. Schmidt admits that he doesn’t know much about the Olympics “apart from the situation in which Simone Biles and Team USA are struggling a bit in men’s basketball and women’s football”.
We’ll help you catch up with Schmidt and begin your educational journey. Read Biles Decision Analysis herewho have favourited the men’s basketball team here, and the women’s soccer team here.
Stick to what you know
“Follow the old-fashioned way of saying that a certain team or athlete is overrated, or the GOAT,” joked Schmidt. “If you do that enough, you might get featured on TV.”
He’s right, even if you probably won’t make it to the small screen: while there are plenty of experts on TV and in the media offering well-done analysis, there are also some people who offer fairly basic opinions. Panditry, whether by air or on a bar stool, is essentially a time filler between actions. You don’t have to know every detail of each sport to sit back and watch fast-moving balls and notice when your country gets a new medal. You can just relax and enjoy the show by offering standard reviews and insights like “Wow, she’s fast”.
