The modern Olympic Games has become a huge media event, with the media contingent being larger than the number of athletes themselves. This is not necessarily such a bad thing. For the sports fan, the media attention on this major sporting event means there is always plenty of news - instant results and discussion, 24 hour coverage, athlete stories, upsets and surprises - you can find out about all of them.

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Olympics Media Articles

  • Popularity of Olympic Sports (2020) — list of the most popular Olympic sports using a weighting of television viewing figures, internet traffic, surveys, ticket sales, media coverage, and number of national federations.
  • Twitter Mentions (2012) — The most Olympic Games tweets, based on Tweets during the 2012 Olympics; soccer was the most popular: football / fútbol / soccer had over 5 million Tweets. The most discussed athlete of the Games was not surprisingly sprinter Usain Bolt, with nine other Olympians gathering more than 1 million Tweets each. The biggest moments of competition, as measured by Tweets per minute, was Usain Bolt winning gold in the 200m sprint.
  • IOC Website Traffic (2004) — Analysis of internet traffic to each sport section of the IOC website in 2004 found aquatics (swimming etc.) the most visited.
  • The Most Olympic Sport Published Articles (2004) — Using data from the Olympic Program Commission about the 2004 Olympic Games, based on newspaper articles. The sport with the most articles published is by a long way Athletics (Track and Field), with swimming second and soccer third.
  • Top-10 Movies about the Olympic Games
  • Radio versus TV Olympic Coverage at the 2008 Olympic Games [blog post]

Olympic Media Trivia

  • The first Olympics to be televised were the Berlin Olympics in 1936. The telecast of events were shown on large screens around Berlin.
  • The first Olympic Games to be telecast into homes were the 1948 London Game which transmitted within the British Isles.
  • The first Olympic Games to be covered by television worldwide was the Rome Olympics in 1960.
  • Broadcast rights nowadays attract a very high fee. In the US, NBC retained the rights in 2012 paying USD$1.181 billion compared to US$894 million in 2008.
  • The 2012 Games was called by some the first social media Olympics.
  • In London in 2012, there were 21,000 fully accredited journalists at the Games, and possibly as many as 40,000 unaccredited ones.