Are the Olympics Still Relevant? Good Idea to Add Breakdancing? Should Tug of War be an Event? Does Anyone Care About the Olympics Anymore?

The Best Paragraph I've Read: The International Olympic Committee's pursuit of urban events to lure a younger audience saw street dance battles officially added to the medal events program at the 2024 Paris Games.  Also confirmed for Paris by the IOC executive board were skateboarding, sport climbing, and surfing. Those three sports will make their Olympic debuts at the Tokyo Games which were postponed because of the coronavirus pandemic by one year to open on July 23, 2021.  Alongside the additions, the IOC made subtractions: The slate of 329 medal events in Paris is 10 fewer than in Tokyo, including four lost from weightlifting, and the athlete quota in 2024 of 10,500 is around 600 less than next year. Two sports with troubled governing bodies -- boxing and weightlifting -- saw the biggest cuts to the number of athletes they can have in Paris. This paragraph comes from ESPN.  The article is written by the Associated Press.  You can read the article here: https://www.espn.com/olympics/story/_/id/30470282/breakdancing-gets-olympic-status-debut-paris-games-2024 Zac and Don discuss the new Olympic Sports and whether it is a good idea to add them.  They also discuss the Olympics and how the event is seen today. Another Best Paragraph I've Read: Tug of War was an Olympic sport from 1900-1920. Check it out. How have they NOT brought this back? The strategic considerations are endless — and probably meaningless. I’m pretty convinced that virtually no insight or understanding is even remotely necessary to form an opinion about Tug of War. In other words: this is perfect for sports/entertainment media. Threshold decision — do you form a national team from scratch or draw from your country’s Olympic delegation, with Tug of War held just before the closing ceremonies? Finally, I would like to see a throwback USA-USSR match. For whatever reason, the IOC decided to dump Tug of War in 1920, just as the Bolsheviks were consolidating their grip on power in Russia, depriving the world of decades of American-Soviet matches that would have made the Cuban missile crisis look like an episode of Who Wants To Be a Millionaire. At the very least, there wouldn’t be any boycotting. The 1980 hockey team is a footnote if, also that year, the Americans had gone to Moscow and beat the Soviets at Tug of War — on their own commie soil. There’s just no way you boycott when Tug of War is on the program. Put simply — the absence of Tug of War for the past century might very well be one of the greatest travesties in Olympic history. Easy as it may be to hang your national pride on the performance of a bunch of pre-teen gymnasts once every four years, there is nothing more fundamental to national identity as Tug of War. This paragraph comes from a Mailbag Question on the Bill Simmons blog.  You can read the question and response here: https://havechanged.blogspot.com/2012/08/bring-back-tug-of-war.html Zac and Don discuss whether it is a good idea to bring Tug of War back to the Olympics.