The Olympics Have Thrills, Tension, Excitement and National Pride. So Why Don't We Care Anymore?

We still seem to be talking about the Olympics — but none of it has much to do with the Olympics itself.

On August 6, at 10:32 p.m. Rio time, Sun Yang lost the men's 400m freestyle final to Australia's Mack Horton by 0.13 seconds.

The Olympics had finally found its first peak of attention among Chinese viewers. But most people didn't learn about it from a live broadcast on TV. They found out on Weibo and in WeChat Moments.

Attention then shifted fast to the fact that Horton had refused to shake Sun's hand before the race. For many who didn't know the backstory, disappointment at the result turned straight into anger, and they went to Horton's Twitter to vent.

A day later, a video of Fu Yuanhui's interview after the women's 100m backstroke semifinal seized everyone's attention. Next to how she actually swam, people were plainly far more excited about this "primordial power girl" and the memes made from her face.

"Surprise" and "delight" are part of what makes the Olympics appealing. The tension and thrill of the races themselves, the tangle of national pride and humiliation they stir up, and the scarcity of something that comes once every four years — these used to be why people sat in front of the television.

This time, almost no one arranged their day around the schedule. Of the 18 people we interviewed over the past week, at least, not one watched a televised event all the way through. They followed this Olympics almost entirely on video platforms and social media — most of the time passively — and mostly on things that had nothing to do with the Olympics itself.

During the Olympics there is no longer only the Olympics. That isn't a surprising outcome, and you have probably felt it yourself. It is also the question this article wants to take up: the Olympics once looked irreplaceable, and it held the attention of the whole country. Why have we stopped being interested?

"The Olympics = TV" — But You Don't Watch TV

Ever since a businessman named Peter Victor Ueberroth was chosen in 1980 to chair the organizing committee of the Los Angeles Olympics, he built an entirely new model: "Olympics + TV."

For viewers who couldn't sit in the Olympic Park, there was no better way to share in the Games and experience them than television. The Olympics became almost a synonym for TV for another reason too: television could pull everyone's attention onto a contest that was "synchronized," "live" and "spectacular."

The Olympics just meant eating dinner around the coffee table with the TV on. A very simple scene.

said Yu Fan, who works at a bank.

When I was little, my family — my dad especially — would read the schedule to follow the Olympics. If an event was on he'd put off lunch, and we'd all wait in front of the TV at home until it started.

That is the Olympics Cello, a young woman fresh out of college, remembers.

The first time I paid attention to the Olympics was 2000. It was summer vacation, my parents weren't comfortable letting me go out on my own, so all there was to do was watch TV.

said Chen Han, born in the late 1980s. Back then there was no social media, not even a mobile phone. Now, she says, "the odds of me watching TV are zero" — when she watches video, she usually opens Bilibili or iQiyi.

In a lot of people's memories, watching the Olympics meant watching a live broadcast, and a live broadcast was a synonym for the Olympics. All of that is changing.

Since the 2004 Athens Olympics, global TV ratings for the Summer Games have fallen every time (Beijing was the exception). In 2016, the audience for the Rio opening ceremony, broadcast in the US by NBC, was down 35% from the previous Games.

In China, during the 2012 opening ceremony, CCTV-1 and CCTV-5 together took a 48.7% national audience share. This year, CCTV-1, CCTV-5, the news channel and the HD sports channel added up to just 29.9%.

The weakening of television is not a new subject, of course; it has been going on since at least the 2012 London Olympics. But if in 2012 the internet was still a supplement to television, by now it has all but replaced it.

In 2012 I watched a fair amount of TV — I'd watch the Olympics on TV, then see something about it on Weibo and repost it. The two fed each other. This year I don't watch TV at all, I go straight to social media.

said Qian Jing, who works in the hotel business.

I get basically all my Olympics news from Moments. I've seen Fu Yuanhui's interview clip and the animations of it, and I found out Sun Yang won gold from a Moments post too … this year I have no motive at all to turn on the TV.

said Zhao Yixin, who has just finished her master's.

What You Enjoy About the Olympics Is "That Moment" — But Attention Is Already Too Scattered

It isn't only television that has lost people's attention. So has the whole way of watching that television stood for. People used to circle the names and times of the programs they wanted, and they did it for the Olympics above all — laying out a schedule in advance, setting an alarm to stay up for an event.

Now the internet, and phones in particular, have broken the way old-fashioned TV ran on a timetable. People can call up video of any Olympic event when they wake the next morning. Many of the people we interviewed take an even easier route: they read the push notifications from news apps.

Information broken into fragments is scattering people's attention faster, and it makes the Olympics look like something that no longer matters much.

It used to feel like everyone was watching the Olympics, that it was a national activity, and if you didn't watch you'd been left behind. … Now there's more and more fast-moving stuff washing over you, and you don't stay on any one thing for long.

said Zhao Yixin, who has just finished her master's.

The content people come across keeps getting richer. It used to be that during the Olympics there was only the Olympics; now there are movies, TV dramas, every kind of online show, and everyone's time has already been carved up.

said Aaron, who works in advertising and has felt the change since 2012.

He is right. In July 2014 there were 5.8 million WeChat official accounts in total; the number nearly doubled over the next two years. On top of that, video sites and livestreaming sites of every kind are fighting for the attention people have left.

Weibo's "trending topics" on the evening of August 13 Beijing time, with the Rio Olympics still running, hint at the same thing: "Rio Olympics" ranked first with 14.51 billion views, but Crossover Singer, Our Rules and Go, Pretty Girls together had already passed it. Without social media stirring things further, it would probably be hard for anything to win that much "national attention" during the Games.

Almost Nothing Gets "National Attention" Anymore, and Everyone Is More Focused on Themselves

The Olympics has its own irreplaceability. Over two weeks it takes in most of the sports humanity has "invented," and it covers more athletes than any other event — more than 11,000 competed this year. That is why it is considered the highest grade of competition there is. Unlike the professional leagues organized around clubs, the Olympics is organized by country, which makes it the event best suited to showing national pride. A competition like that ought to be full of thrills, excitement and flashpoints.

The problem now is that people no longer go looking for that kind of thrill. Everyone is more focused on themselves. That, too, is what fragmented attention produces.

There's no one big thing left that can reach everybody. What people follow keeps getting more private, and everyone's is different.

said Aaron, who works in advertising.

I don't know where this sense of superiority about not watching the Olympics comes from. The new events this year, golf and rugby, I think are a bit cool … but I still don't even feel like watching.

said Yu Fan, who stopped watching the Olympics in high school.

The thing that stayed with me these past few days wasn't Fu Yuanhui's memes or the moment Sun Yang won. It was a video called "Less Than One" shared by an official account, a story about soulmates. I watched it three times over.

said Zhao Yixin.

I watch Bilibili. I don't watch news, but I watch TV dramas or movies, and I use a VPN to watch YouTube — British reality shows, clips from the Ellen Show. It feels very random, I don't subscribe to anything on purpose. … You can't say your attention is being controlled, but you no longer go out of your way to follow things. On the passive side, it's far too easy to be pulled apart — this today, that tomorrow. There's always something you care about yourself, and always some bigger thing to follow, so you don't have the energy to put on any one thing.

Zhao Yixin again.

Chinese people pay a lot of attention to their own health now. I think the root reason is that we have money, that our standard of living has risen. So people start caring more about themselves, more about their own condition. When people have nothing hanging over them, or when their own lives are good, whole, complete, they don't pay much attention to anybody else.

said Li Xin, a Sina Sports reporter.

Advertisers Have No Appetite for Fanning the Flames Either

Ever since the "TV + Olympics" model was invented, the Games have been one of the events the advertising business throws itself into most eagerly. Sponsors are one of the Olympics' most important sources of revenue, and they also fan its publicity.

In 1984, a top Olympic sponsor paid roughly $4 million; by 2008 and 2012 the figure had passed $60 million and $80 million. The sponsorship fee is only one part of it. For Olympic sponsors, more money goes into the marketing that follows, plastering posters and TV commercials full of Olympic imagery across every outlet.

The Brazilian organizing committee never disclosed this year's sponsorship figures, but it policed advertising severely.

Under the latest version of Rule 40 of the IOC's Olympic Charter, "Olympic-related words" — "gold medal," "silver medal," "bronze medal," "Rio" — are barred from the marketing of any company that is not an official Olympic commercial partner. The Rio Games even ruled that no event result, and no photograph taken during the Games, could be used freely.

But advertisers seem to have had little appetite for Rio either.

Normally the campaign has to start three months out. This year no brand was doing anything Olympic. It was only about a week or two out that any promotional material appeared at all. … I find it genuinely strange. It's not that the market response was bad so people stopped. It's that no company wanted to do it in the first place.

said Li Wei, CEO and partner of the China arm of the creative agency Anomaly.

When I was at J. Walter Thompson I worked on Olympics marketing. You'd normally start a year out, maybe earlier. If athletes are in the campaign you have to finish the whole production before the end of the year, because after New Year they go into closed training. The path from idea to strategy is usually planned well ahead. You don't wait for the Olympics to start and then go make ads.

said Li Wei.

Brands aren't even keen to be associated with the Olympics now. They'd rather do something small — sponsor a running event or a sports club.

said Aaron, who works in advertising.

Once the Games begin, brands still want to fight for attention. But as Li Wei sees it, nobody has the right answer to whether new media is the right platform for Olympics marketing at all, or to how you innovate on it.

The marketing methods that worked before don't work now. At the Beijing Olympics you could put out some social content — a picture with a funny headline — and people liked it. Now nobody finds that impressive.

said Li Wei.

The Olympics used to be the moment when big brands worked out every way they could to grab young people's attention, and to some degree that marketing also built the mood for watching the Games. This year the mood was missing.

Zhao Lin (a pseudonym), who sells Olympic T-shirts on Taobao, is a little anxious too. "Sales this year are about ten times worse than past Games, and I'm not exaggerating. At London I didn't even build a marketing page and business was already good." Zhao did notice one thing: "At the London Olympics Taobao wouldn't let you put the word 'Olympics' in a listing title, but this year you can. That tells you something too — the commercial value this year isn't high."

The Portal Sites That Once Played a Key Supporting Role Have Declined, and Nothing New Has Replaced Them

At the 2008 Beijing Olympics, CCTV sold the new-media rights to more than ten Chinese websites for 30 million to 50 million yuan apiece, clearing nearly 400 million yuan on the deal. Sina, NetEase and Tencent — three portals — jointly took the video broadcast rights for those Games. By this year's Rio Olympics, of the four big portals only Tencent was still in the running for the rights; Sina, NetEase and Sohu all sat out the "contest."

The portals used to be television's best ally. They would build large dedicated packages, and many people got the medal table from a portal. They knew how to build buzz and steer the conversation. But as the portal model has declined, they no longer have that ability.

Sina Sports is trying to draw readers in with more entertaining formats. "We might put out an H5 — say, if you treated Michael Phelps as a country, he'd rank about 40th in the medal standings. We do that from the back office and coordinate with our reporters on the ground," Li Xin, a Sina Sports reporter, told us.

We [Sina] have all sorts of our own products for this too. We have our own livestreaming, like a lot of the popular streaming apps now, and something along the lines of Fenda, the paid Q&A app.

These products are all trying to draw the audience in and get it involved. The results have been ordinary.

Tencent acquired the new-media rights to the Rio Olympics only two weeks before the Games officially opened, and its feed ran 30 minutes behind. That gap was more than enough to hand control of the conversation to social media.

Tencent had locked in its status as the sole internet-services partner of the Chinese Olympic Committee for these Games as early as 2013, and it put a 600-person team, technical staff included, behind seven original shows. Yet with single videos drawing views in the five- and six-figure range, the programming's reach was still limited, and Tencent's sports coverage showed little ability to create topics of its own. It looked more like it was being led by the nose by whatever was hot on social media.

Fu Yuanhui's internet-celebrity mode isn't a normal way for a sports video to get consumed.

said Xu Shaolian, director of Tencent Sports.

For all that, "the Fu Yuanhuis" are still exactly the sort of hot topic they concentrate on catching.

With something like the Fu Yuanhui interview, two or three seconds after the clip appeared we knew it had gone viral. Within a minute we were digging up her old videos — pictures, text, video, every angle.

said Xu Shaolian.

You can see that what they know best is how to meet a demand for entertainment.

Host Brazil Can't Generate Buzz, and Its Unfamiliarity Is a Real Weakness

Brazil's distance and the plain facts about it also played a part. The 11-hour time difference with China made many people miss the chance to watch events as they happened, which is fatal for a sport that lives on timeliness.

London in 2012 was a place everybody was reasonably familiar with, and attention was quite high. But honestly, by 2016 you could clearly feel that a lot of the audience, ordinary Chinese people, weren't familiar with Rio, with Brazil. It felt like a distant, unfamiliar place, and that indirectly made them less interested in this year's Games than before.

said Mo Kangsun, chairman of McCann-Erickson Guangming Advertising, which handled Coca-Cola China's and Hisense's Olympics marketing this year.

If picking at geography that nobody chose seems harsh, then Brazil's economic slide, the steep fall of its currency (down 32% against last year) and the political turmoil around President Rousseff's impeachment are harder to excuse.

Right up to a month before the Rio Games officially opened, the news was still full of unfinished venues, a polluted Rio bay and crude facilities in the Olympic Village.

Next to London, Brazil also lacked the ability to make noise and invent things, to take up the media's attention and turn the direction of the talk. The damage showed quickly.

A lot of friends of mine reporting from Rio weren't as active or bold with their coverage this time. They were quite worried about safety at the Rio Games.

said Li Shuangfu, who ran Lanxiong Sports' Olympics coverage.

Before I came to Rio, my company, worried about my safety, said I shouldn't cover the women's volleyball team, because somewhere an hour away could be dangerous.

said Li Xin, a Sina Sports reporter, who reached São Paulo on July 24 and Rio on the 30th.

A lot of outlets have become much more conservative about story choices because of safety. Even a reporter like me, who has worked this beat for five or six years, could end up unable to cover my own beat for safety reasons. That's a very obvious problem.

said Li Xin.

2008 Already Used Up All the Passion for the Olympics

Almost every person we interviewed brought up the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

That year the eyes of the whole world were on China. It wasn't only that the world was waiting to see how a China being called a "rising great power" would perform; Chinese people were holding their breath too, determined to prove themselves to the world. National pride erupted, collectively, that year.

But it was like finishing a ritual: everyone already knew this would be the peak of Chinese interest in the Olympics.

The drop in Olympics fever started at the London Olympics. That's when the public's interest in the Games stopped being so high. Beijing in 2008 was the ceiling. It's only going to get lower.

said Aaron.

Because Beijing hosted it, I remember concrete things — Lin Miaoke at the opening ceremony, the scroll-painting effect on the stage. I don't really remember the London Olympics before it.

said Cello, who graduated from college this year.

The Olympics is a stage, and this is when everyone looks for a breakout moment. Over the last two or three Games — honestly, at Beijing everyone did everything they could think of, and at London people were still trying to think of more. This time people feel the Olympics just isn't a strong breakout moment anymore.

said Li Wei.

When the economy wasn't doing well there wasn't much else to talk about, so people talked about the Olympics. The hold the Olympics has on people now, on young people especially, is nothing like what it had on us.

said Qiao Qiao, born in the early 1970s.

In the End, Entertainment Became What Everyone Wanted

You have probably noticed it too: the most popular Olympics articles in Moments this year were not race news or medal counts but Fu Yuanhui's memes, Ning Zetao's abs and the quarrel between Sun Yang and Horton. Variety may be a good thing. Amusing ourselves to death isn't necessarily so good.

Nobody around me is looking at gold medals. It's how handsome Ning Zetao is, how cute Sun Yang is, Fu Yuanhui's memes, or the sailor Xu Lijia and other Chinese athletes getting trashed online.

said Qian Jing.

Some girls will say 'Ning Zetao is so handsome, look at those abs,' and others will talk about the Horton–Sun Yang quarrel.

said Cello, on how the people around her follow the Olympics.

There's a type of person around me who just reposts and spreads things, and the reason isn't the event or the sport itself. Fu Yuanhui, for instance, had the makings of something that spreads like a virus.

said Zhao Yixin.

There are still people who love the Olympics, of course. This is the third Games in a row Yang Bai has gone to in person; he watched seven events and one opening ceremony this year, and spent about 5,000 yuan on tickets alone.

"I was lucky enough to win a ticket for the Beijing Olympics, and that's where the habit of going in person started. I went to London too. Atlanta, Sydney and Athens I followed in front of the TV. I'd call myself an Olympics obsessive," Yang Bai said. "Maybe half of it is feeling — saying the Olympic spirit can point your life in a direction sounds a bit airy, but experiencing it in person really is different. It gives you endless energy."

You could argue, of course, that people haven't stopped paying attention to the Olympics, only that what they want from it has moved from national pride toward entertainment. But at bottom that still shows the Olympics itself carries less weight — entertainment value is not irreplaceable (the Olympics itself is the irreplaceable event), and any entertainment can be buried by a juicier piece of celebrity gossip. Everyone knows perfectly well that when people are watching "Fu Yuanhui" and "Ning Zetao," they are not watching the Olympics.

We still seem to be talking about the Olympics — but none of it has much to do with the Olympics itself.

(Reporter Yang Lin also contributed to this article.)

Cover image from lesports.com, baltimoresun.com