What I Learned From Watching Every Sport At The Tokyo Olympics

I don't know how I got to be as old as I am without knowing that dressage horses danced to music. Don't get me wrong: I knew dressage was fancy horses. I just didn't know it was fancy horses who danced to an orchestral arrangement of Queen's "Radio Ga-Ga."

Coming into the Tokyo Games, I was conflicted and troubled, as a lot of people were, by a knot of injustices and safety concerns that made me wonder whether there was any way to really enjoy them at all. And so, I decided to treat them as a chance to visit a whole host of unfamiliar worlds in which people work harder than many of us can imagine to build toward a moment that, for many competitors, will only come once and will not result in any glory, or any real money, at all.

To my own surprise, I find two weeks later that being a completist for the first time by watching some of every sport made me a fan again. And stepping away from the prime-time coverage that highlights only a few sports and only a few athletes — with heavily produced stories that sometimes contextualize their hard work in oversimplified ways — made it possible to think differently about what makes a sport beautiful in the first place.

Of course, nothing improves the sports spectator experience like an obsession with arcane rules, so let me oblige. I watched more than every sport and less than every event; what I tried to do was catch every discipline. I also followed a Familiarity Rule, under which I made only symbolic visits to the Olympic sports that have the highest media exposure in the country where I live: baseball, basketball, boxing, tennis, and golf. If I'm going to sit down and spend time navigating the various viewing options needed to watch the Olympics, it's not so I can watch golf. (Sorry not sorry, golf.)

But as to the rest, I watched as much as I could. Mostly athletes I had never heard of, mostly athletes who were not