“Younger people aren’t losing interest in sports. In fact, engagement has never been higher,” said Michael Neuman, the managing partner of Scout Sports and Entertainment, a division of US marketing consultancy Horizon Media.

“[The issue is that] linear, ‘watch-what-we-show-you’ broadcast experiences are becoming less compelling for younger audiences who want to migrate to other platforms where they are in more control of highlights, access, information and stats.”

The television audience in the United States – the largest market for Olympics broadcasting in terms of revenue – has aged quicker than the overall population.

The median age of American viewers for the 2016 Games in Rio de Janeiro was 52.4, higher than 49.5 years for the 2012 edition in London and 45.5 for Sydney 2000, according to marketing industry publication Ad Age.

While viewership data for Asia was not readily available, Dr Juanita Cheung Sin-ting from the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) said young people in the region who did not regularly play sports were even less interested in sporting events than their European and North American counterparts.

“People in Western countries might need to rely on sports events to expand their social network and make friends,” said the senior lecturer at the university’s education faculty, who specialises in sports motivation.

“Having a sports event that everyone can talk about unites people. The lively atmosphere that comes with watching sports can make them feel less lonely.”

By contrast, Cheung said, people in Asia spent more time with their families and did not need to rely on watching sports events to make friends. She added that parents also prioritised academic achievements over sports in some parts of the region, which held back a sports culture from flourishing.

To the International Olympic Committee (IOC), this is a crisis. Seventy-three per cent of its global revenue of US$5.7 billion in the most recent Olympic cycle, from 2013 to 2016, came from television broadcasting rights.

While young people are not currently the audience with spending power, they are the ones poised to take over – and yet they have no interest in watching sports, said Dr Lobo Louie Hung-tak, an associate professor at Baptist University’s sport, physical education and health department.

Although this economic factor was the primary driver behind the IOC’s interest in appealing to young people, he said, the organisation was also concerned about the legacy of Olympism – the philosophy of the Games, which promotes sports as a key to a balanced lifestyle and harmonious human development.

Neuman, the managing partner of Scout Sports and Entertainment, said as the Games had come off a series of scandals in the past 20 years – these include state-sponsored doping, hosting countries’ human rights records and transparency in governance – it was the IOC’s Olympic Agenda 2020 that was meant “to reinstate the Olympics to all its glamour while leaving behind an evergreen legacy in host countries”.

As Japan’s Olympics tourism boom turns bust, once-hopeful businesses count the cost

The agenda – a set of recommendations to strengthen the role of sport in society – addresses a range of issues facing the Olympics, including youth engagement. “The only way to grow tomorrow’s viewership and interest is to cultivate relationships with today’s younger generation of sports fans,” Neuman said.

But media consumption does not reveal the full extent of the lack of interest in the Olympics and, more generally, sports.

Louie from Baptist University said the physical fitness of young people was declining worldwide because of a more sedentary lifestyle with the rise of electronic media, even in countries with a strong sporting culture such as Australia, Canada and the US.

“With a weaker physical ability, a young person’s appreciation for and interest in sports will also decrease,” he said, stressing that this was one of many factors that had led to younger people watching fewer sports events.

Eighty-one per cent of students aged 11 to 17 globally were not exercising enough, according to a 2019 study funded by the World Health Organization that was published in The Lancet Child and Adolescent Health journal.

A review published last year in the journal Frontiers in Pediatrics showed that the strength and endurance of children and adolescents had constantly declined in recent decades. The review of 19 studies covering the period from 1969 to 2017 had a combined sample size of 1.7 million children from 14 countries, including China, Sweden, Mozambique and Canada.

Part of the problem with the disinterest in sports, Cheung of CUHK said, was that sports federations tended to focus on young elite athletes rather than developing all children’s interest in sports.

Tokyo Olympics: between Covid-19 and financial worries, Japan weighs the cost of allowing spectators in stadiums

The IOC agrees. Its president, Thomas Bach, said in 2014: “As a sports organisation we cannot be satisfied only with increasing numbers of young people watching the Olympic Games. We have an interest and a responsibility to get the couch potatoes off the couch.”

The group and its media partners have resorted to innovative ways to win the hearts and minds of Generation Z and young millennials.

Freestyle BMX, surfing, sport climbing, 3×3 basketball and skateboarding will make their summer Olympic debuts in Tokyo this year, while breakdancing will become an Olympic sport for Paris 2024.

“By including extreme sports in the Olympics, young people who weren’t interested in sports might also [tune in],” said Haruka Matsumoto, a 23-year-old fan club recruiter for a baseball team in Japan.

05:37

Who will break IOC Rule 50 against protesting during the Tokyo Summer Olympics?

Who will break IOC Rule 50 against protesting during the Tokyo Summer Olympics?

The IOC has also made a deliberate effort to turn to social media platforms popular with young users – such as TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram – to promote the Olympics.

The IOC did not directly respond to queries about how successful its foray into these social media platforms would be, but said via email: “During its first year of activity, the @Olympics handle on TikTok attracted a very engaged and youthful community of over 1 million followers. On Snapchat, since July 2020, our content has achieved more than 200 million video views.”

Official broadcasters have also recognised that television is becoming less relevant. China Media Group, the state-owned company that operates CCTV, has sublicensed Olympics content to video-sharing and live-streaming app Kuaishou, which had an average of 305 million daily active users in China from January to September last year.

In the US, NBC partnered with video game live-streaming platform Twitch to create interactive content, such as a stream of the Olympic torch relay in which viewers need to collect items and work together in the chat to “light the cauldron”.

But the most potentially influential move in the bid to get young people to watch the Olympics is the addition of video games to the roster – even though this is a long road that is still years away from its destination. 

In 2024, at the Paris Games, esports will be an Olympic demonstration event for the first time, but for Tokyo this year, the IOC has organised an “Olympic Virtual Series”.

This consists of competitions in four existing video games – emulating baseball, cycling, sailing and motor-racing – that have been reskinned with Olympic colours, along with a rowing event that will see competitors use a rowing machine.

The Olympics has been slow to adopt esports because of concerns over game violence, as IOC president Bach outlined in March: “Any game where there is violence glorified or accepted, where you have any kind of discrimination, they have nothing to do with the Olympic values.”

This rules out some of the most popular games on distribution platform Steam, including the likes of Fortnite, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Dota 2. On top of this, Cheung from CUHK questions whether the IOC can actually encourage gamers to become athletes.

While more research is needed, she said, Hong Kong’s “electronic PE classes” – during which schoolchildren play on motion-sensing gaming consoles on rainy days – showed that gaming did not translate into physical exercise.

Though the Olympics was not at risk of becoming irrelevant because of the revenue it generated, an accelerated cultural shift meant the IOC had to introduce initiatives to win over young people, Louie from Baptist University said.

“They have to understand what young people love,” he said. “If you clearly know the culture is changing quicker than before and choose not to act, you’ll be criticised.”