Let’s imagine the college-age version of me. I maybe thought I was something special. This was testosterone talking. The mirror said something different. So did my college friends.
Let’s imagine further that we walked into an establishment. Incredibly, at the bar was sitting the one and only Christie Brinkley.
What to say? What to do? Hey, I’m something special! “Uh, hello? What are you doing here?”
Weak, right? Smacks of desperation? Despair?
Something like what the International Olympic Committee put out a few days ago when it announced it was hurriedly getting into the esports business with a series before Tokyo 2020 — a weak, ill-thought-out, ill-conceived, desperate, dumb approach. Like, what are you doing here?
Christie Brinkley, 1980s // Getty Images
This is epic — but not in an esports way.
As with the fantasy of me talking up Christie Brinkley, the IOC has the right idea. Traditionalists, time (again) to retire your timesome yadda-yadda-yadda about what is “sport,” like shotput at ancient Olympia. I was there in 2004. Got it.
Kudos to the IOC — amid the chronic churn of crisis management connected to Tokyo 2020 and Beijing 2022 — for having even a nanosecond to consider esports. Bravo to IOC president Thomas Bach, again, for having the vision thing, as he has consistently, to understand that esports is now, not some cyberpunk weirdo idea off in the future.
As has also consistently proven the case, however, since a July 2018 esports “summit” in Lausanne, it’s the way the IOC has sought to meld old and new, tradition and now, that is so perplexing and bewildering — if not provocatively poor.
Here is why esports is now. The IOC’s No. 1 goal is to be relevant. Young people have signaled with their time, their wallets and their communities that esports is where they’re at. And for all the gaudy numbers, we are still on the ground floor, because many areas of the world are still without reliable internet service.
Tencent, the gaming and social media giant based in Shenzhen, China, reported a 175 percent rise in quarterly profit in its March earnings statement. Tencent is the world’s largest gaming firm by revenue. For those three months through December 2020 reflected in that March earnings statement (remember: pandemic), it reported nearly $9.1 billion in profit. Not revenue — profit. That beat analyst estimates by … 80 percent.
The IOC can be a little slow at the joystick but numbers like $9 billion for a quarter in profit tend to be attention-grabbers, particularly in Switzerland. You know?
The evidence pointing to the esports up, up, uptrend lines is everywhere. Sunday’s Times (the London one) offered a report in which Nolan Bushnell, 78, the co-founder of Atari and inventor of Pong (from way back when) predicted the time is coming when esports will overtake even the World Cup: “People would rather much watch or play esports than watch traditional football.”
These kinds of statements also tend to grab attention in traditional sports circles.
All the more so because, in our world, now, esports offers connection and community to young people — the demographic the IOC is eternally chasing — in a way that insiders (not the IOC) understand.
It’s a radically new way of promoting the real Olympic values — respect, excellence, friendship — as well as hard and soft skills that often can be translated into the business sphere, particularly across the developing world, with literally millions of young people under 25.
Among other reasons, this is why the chief executive of Santa Monica, California-based Activision Blizzard donated $4 million to the University of Michigan to launch a multidisciplinary esports program. Front Office Sports reported that the growth in the United States alone of college esports is expected to surpass $1.5 billion by 2023, and a Michigan kinesiology professor said, “Esports has very different, unique aspects that we need to begin to understand. This is what makes it so exciting.”
At that 2018 esports ‘summit’ in Lausanne, many lofty and exciting things were said. Since, from the IOC side, the key players at that meeting have, for a variety of reasons, left the scene. The publishers, for their part, feel unwanted and unloved.
This would be unremarkable but for the reality that in the esports landscape it is the publishers — not the IOC — who hold the leverage. Typically, it’s the other way around, of course. The IOC and its affiliated federations “own” the sports. Here, it’s vice-versa. Who literally owns the games?
The IOC has cobbled together a group, the “Esports and Gaming Liaison Group,” composed primarily of old white dudes who say little, understand less and consequently, as events this week prove, manage to screw things up when they take action because they have little to no feel for what’s what.
Complicating matters is that the chair of this group is David Lappartient, president of the cycling federation, the UCI. Lappartient is not an IOC member though he is an avid and ferocious operator in French politics. You’d have to be an idiot not to see him angling for an IOC spot and the IOC presidency sooner than later, with esports the catalyst.
Bach has introduced to the Olympic landscape something called Agenda 2020+5 — or, in IOC jargon, “plus-5.” This marks the latest iteration of the alleged reforms designed to succeed the 2014-issue Agenda 2020, which by definition had a sell-by date of December 31, 2020. Points eight and nine of plus-five are devoted to esports. (Why “plus-five”? Because that takes us until 2025, when Bach’s second term will expire.)
Point eight: “grow digital engagement with people”
Point nine: “encourage the development of virtual sports and further engage with video gaming communities”
Just to show you what kind of work the IOC has to do when it comes to point eight — “Olympics” has 1.4 million followers on TikTok with 18.1 million likes. Fortnite had 250 million registered players in March 2019; by May 2020, that number was 350 million.
For perspective, 350 million is edging toward 5 percent of the population of Planet Earth.
As for point nine, we get to the clumsy effort brought forth by Lappartient and the IOC — amid great fanfare from the Chateau de Vidy, perhaps the memo having gone around staff to be sure now to applaud in public on Facebook and Twitter, because there surely was a lot of that from the apparatchik. The rest of the world, if it noticed, yawned.
Michael Payne and I have known each other for more than 20 years. He is the IOC’s former marketing director, now one of the globe’s most influential strategists, and I have the utmost respect for him.
The gentle rejoinder: of course the mainstream media could (relatively) care less. The esports audience doesn’t sit down each glorious morning with a cup of coffee and, say, the Tribune de Genève.
If you were to check out what the audience did say (disclosure: it has helped for years to be schooled by, among others, undergrads at the University of Southern California), you would find that the reaction was underwhelming. Their online spaces are lightyears removed from the Tribune de Genève.
This is because, as Bach himself has said in connection with the host-city context, the IOC is perceived far and wide as the establishment. Esports is not an establishment universe.
Neither, sure, were snowboarding and skateboarding, now on the Olympic program — but the esports audience, the players anywhere and everywhere and the executives in their Shenzhen and Santa Monica offices, have a far different take on the Olympics than skateboard, snowboard and even surf.
Like, again, who needs who more?
So, what, exactly, did the IOC say?
Where would the Olympic movement be without an acronym? Five sports would be part of what the IOC called, with grandiose effect, the Olympic Virtual Series, or OVS:
Baseball, cycling, rowing, sailing, and motorsports.
Bach was given the first quote in the news release, saying, among other things, that this initiative was in line with plus-five (of course) and — with respect, these mark some of the most disingenuous words ever to be attributed to him — “encourages sports participation and promotes the Olympic values, with a special focus on youth.”
Promotes the Olympic values?!
Baseball? Kicked out of the Games after 2008. Will return for Tokyo. But apparently not important enough, Olympic values-wise, to return for Paris 2024.
Cycling? Let’s start with Mr. Armstrong. Anyone who wants to believe that this sport is cleaner now, raise your hand. Beyond, the e-version of cycling for IOC purposes revolves around the platform Zwift. Already, we’ve seen allegations of rampant cheating in Zwift. (Don’t believe it — simply Google, “Is it possible to cheat on Zwift?”) To be clear, not the platform itself but the people using it. Values!
Third, and most laughably, motorsports. The issue here is the IOC trying to latch on to the digital version of road racing. Because in no way, shape or form are motorsports part of the Olympics. This is a straight-up grab — not a values proposition.
Motorsports! The only thing the IOC hated more than esports was motorsports. And baseball and softball!
The notion of motorsports is so laughable on so many levels — not least for an institution that figuratively pats itself on the back time and again for its commitment to “sustainability.”
What’s next? Monster-truck racing?
The other two:
Sailing — who wants to argue that sailing is not elitist? Even its most famous gold medalists have to dispute the charge.
Rowing — ditto on the elitist thing. Where is U.S. Rowing located, for god’s sake? Princeton.
In that IOC news release, Lappartient got the second quote. He told the world that the series marked “an exciting step forward for the virtual sports world and the Olympic movement.”
It certainly was exciting — for all the publishers who didn’t know the first thing about it, the many international sports federations who similarly were blindsided by the announcement and a raft of others who were, like, what in the world?
Typically, the IOC is fastidious and meticulous in attention to laborious layers of process. That is what it did when working through nearly a year of Rule 50 deliberations, investing in a worldwide survey, hiring a law firm, holding a series of meetings, then managing last week’s decision to keep in place the rule about no protests on the podium at the Games.
Here, just the opposite: seemingly out ot the blue sky, it dropped a massive clunker with this ‘OVS’ thing, sandbagging any number of key constituents.
In this instance, where was the methodology? The analysis? The process?
To reiterate: a significant number of stakeholders literally had no idea this was coming.
Not only that, this series is due to begin May 13. That marks Eid al-Fitr, the holiday by which Muslims worldwide celebrate the end of Ramadan. Did anyone in Lausanne even take a look at the calendar?
Dollars to doughnuts, to use the colloquialism here in the States, here is what likely happened:
Some number of people at — or connected to — the IOC of a certain age (read: older) are competitively Zwifting and were, like, hey, what about this?
They were thinking: this Zwift thing — Zwift is a rival to Peloton — can be fun and we are sweating like dogs and I’m beating you, dude.
So then they were, like, hey, if we start with Zwift, that’s one sport, and we have FIVE RINGS and we need FIVE SPORTS — that would be cool because THEY ARE THE SAME NUMBER! What can we put together? Get me 1-800-DREAMHACK — DreamHack Sports Games is the outfit the IOC chose to market and produce this enterprise. And then someone pointed out that one of the five that got picked is all about cars and they pollute and stuff and climate change is a, perhaps the, issue of our time and we in the Olympic scene like to say — especially at Paris 2024, which wouldn’t even take on Total, the French oil company, as a 100 million-euro sponsor, and Lappartient is French and all that — that we’re all about sustainability! And someone else said, oh, don’t worry about that because WE HAVE A LOGO and one of the words is in REVERSE TYPE and that is AWESOME and we will do a CUTAWAY on top of the V for VIRTUAL!
Stop.
Did anyone think who was going to compete in this thing?
For an organization that purports — relentlessly, endlessly — to be about athletes first, who is center stage? No, seriously — who?
Do they represent countries or territories? Themselves? Do they get cool esports names, like LAUSNRLZ or BRSBN32 or USAIN958?
What is this project the answer to?
More important:
What is the question?
The esports landscape is particularly sensitive to what’s organic and real, and what’s not.
Esports is community and connection. It either happens, or it doesn’t. The IOC is trying to jam a square peg into a round hole.
The idea that the IOC is going to drop this project pre-Tokyo — what does this say about the IOC’s confidence in Tokyo, that it’s launching this now, hello, diversion, what — and expect it to take off has about as much success as the college age-version me with, you know, Christie Brinkley.
You can’t always get what you want. Wait. That was Mick Jagger. Not Billy Joel.
Just — epic.