esports

Epic, colossal, like -- what? IOC's latest esports misstep

Epic, colossal, like -- what? IOC's latest esports misstep

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?

IOC must 'urgently' re-do esports strategy, this time for real

IOC must 'urgently' re-do esports strategy, this time for real

Six months ago, International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach published a remarkable white paper about the state of Olympics, as he saw it, amid the pandemic. More remarkably, it drew — and yet more remarkably still, over the months since has drawn — comparatively little media attention. Like almost zero.

The think piece was called — you’ve got to love this title — “Olympism and Corona.”

If Roger Goodell wrote such a piece about the state of the NFL, or Adam Silver about the NBA, odds are it would be the stuff of hot takes on sports radio and cable TV, and for weeks. Here was Bach thoughtfully trying to sort out the new realities of the most complex puzzle the world knows, the Olympic Games, in reaction to the shifting realities of a global pandemic. Reaction: mostly crickets.

He deserved better, particularly because in the fourth copy block, entitled “Social Impact,” third paragraph, the IOC president signaled to the entire world — if, like, anyone was paying attention, which obviously they were not — that esports ought to be taken seriously. He used the word “urgently.” The IOC almost never uses the word “urgently.” This time, though, it did.