The Olympic games were originally held in Ancient Greece over 2,000 years ago. The participants were citizens representing the various Greek city-states of the period. We don't know how many people participated, but it is estimated that the population of ancient Greece at the time fell between 7.5 and 10 million people. (For comparison, NYC has a population around 8.3 million, right in the middle of the estimated range for Ancient Greece. Imagine the Olympic games, but it's just the suburbs of NYC competing against each other.) It is very unlikely that more than 1,000 people participated, and it was probably more like a few hundred. Perhaps somewhere between 1 in 10,000 and 1 in 25,000 people living in Ancient Greece participated in the original Olympic games annually.
The Olympic games were held as a sort of way for the different city-states to show off their best athletes and prove them in competition against the best of the other city-states. The actual games held during the Olympics changed over time, with some long standing favorites, but also with additions as the grounds and control of the games changed hands over time. The Roman Emperor Nero is recorded to have added music competitions to the Olympics. The games generally followed the cultures controlling the Olympics.
The Olympic games ended around 400AD, during the decline of the Roman Empire. The modern Olympics began in 1896, with some of the same games as the original but also with new games more relevant to the modern culture of the time. Over the last century we've seen many games come and go, largely due to the changing cultures over time. Today there are many more games than the original Olympics started with, which makes sense as we have so many more people and thus so many more sports. We've also integrated sports from more cultures. Ancient Greece was a geographically small region with a very small population compared to the number of countries involved in the Olympics today. There just wasn't enough population to support that many unique sports. When the Olympics were revived in the late 1800s, the world population was up to more than 1.5 billion. That's over 150 times as many people as the region that participated in the original games. Now the world is up to a population of around 8 billion. Over the last two decades, we've had around 10,000 to 11,000 participants for each Summer Olympics, somewhere around 35 times as many as probably participated in the original games. And that's the first place we can see the problem.
With a current population of 8 billion, we have 800 times the population of the region that participated in the first Olympics, but we only have around 35 times the number of participants. The games have scaled very poorly. We should expect more on the order of 240,000 participants, given the current population. This means that for each participant in our current Olympics, there are more than 21 people who would have qualified to compete given the original population that have been pushed out.
Now, it might be tempting to argue that we filter much better, so those 21 people per participant wouldn't have won anyway, but we've seen how an Olympic athlete can have a bad day and fail. Every time that has happened, any of those other 21 people who weren't selected (or the other hundreds that were pushed out by their competitors) would have had a chance to take it. It's even worse though! We are really only looking for those 10k to 11k people. What about all of the people who get missed, because some coach thinks they've found "the one" and stopped looking? With smaller populations and higher participation rates, it is much harder to miss the real Olympians because you think you've found the right one already. With a world population on the order of 8 billion today, what are the odds we are successfully finding the actual best athletes of any country to participate in the Olympics? Odds are for each Olympic gold winner, there are at least 5 to 10 people in their country alone who are better than them. The Olympics is no longer about sending your best to represent your country. It's mere pageantry, worshipping times long past.
This might all seem harsh. Where's the hard proof of any of this? Well, that's where all of this started. Get on YouTube and look up videos of people doing "epic" or "awesome" things. A good search term is "people doing amazing things", and you can swap out "amazing" for "epic", "awesome", or many other superlative adjectives. There are thousands of videos on YouTube that are compilations of tens to hundreds of people doing things that most Olympians couldn't hope to achieve. Sure, a lot of them require tens to hundreds of takes, while the Olympics generally requires you to get it right on the first try, but even if only a percent of a percent are true skill rather than multiple takes, that still outshines the Olympics like a thousand Suns! The truth is, you don't need to watch the Olympics to see the best of the best show off their skills. The only place you can find that, at least for now, is on YouTube. The Olympics are where you can find the people who were a little better than average, who were coached to become a little worse than the actual best.
On top of all of this though, there's one more thing you can learn from YouTube: With 800 times as many people, we also have more than 800 times as many games, and the Olympics can't hope to include every relevant game. For every weightlifting competition there is in the Olympics, there are a bunch of people lifting the same weights with one hand, lifting the same weights while on a rolling platform, and at least 10 or more additional variants that make it significantly more difficult than anything seen at the Olympics. If you thought Simone Biles was good (and she was), there are at least 100 or more other people on YouTube doing far more complex and difficult routines. This is just how the world is now. There are legitimately too many people for scouts and coaches to find and select the actual best from, and most of the time they can't even get one of the top 100! I mean no disrespect for Olympians who put in enormous amounts of effort to train and approach being the best in their sport. They certainly deserve that respect for the effort and dedication they've put in. But they aren't the best. As talented and above average as they started out, they just can't compete with the absolutely massive population of humans now on the Earth, many of whom are more talented than them but will never be discovered by the scouts and coaches.
There's nothing wrong with watching the Olympics, if that's what you want to do. I'm not trying to ruin for you. But the idea that Olympians are actually the best of the best just isn't true anymore. If you want to participate in a pageant for the worship of a particular historical event, then the Olympics is a great way to do that. If, however, you actually want to see the best of the best, you can get on YouTube and watch what truly talented and dedicated humans can do! The Olympics are nothing more than a dim reflection of the true potential of humanity.
