The Winter Olympics start this week. Do Americans care?

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Confessions up front: I love the Olympics.

I love seeing feats of strength and talent I could never imagine achieving myself. I love hearing stories of athletes' determination in the face of incredible odds. I enjoy the feeling of convincing myself I'm an expert at an obscure event based solely off of watching 20 minutes of coverage and a quick Wikipedia-ing. I love America winning anything, ever. I believe Mary Carillo is an underrated national treasure. (Please, please, stop what you are doing, take three and a half minutes, and watch Mary Carillo's 2004 exploration of the magic of badminton.)

The very first speech I ever gave, for an elementary school oration contest, was about the perseverance of American speed skater Dan Jansen. Jansen learned that his sister had died of leukemia and had to skate that same day in the 1988 Games, falling on the ice during the race. Six years later, he returned triumphantly and finally won his first gold at the Lillehammer Games in 1994.

So, again: I love the Olympics.

But even I admit to feeling relatively checked-out about this year's games. Opening ceremonies are on Friday and I can only confidently name two Americans competing. (I've seen ads featuring snowboarder Shaun White and skiier Mikaela Shiffrin, so I assume they will be there.) I am not averse to spending long stretches of time in front of the TV, nor to intense displays of patriotism, but I just can't get excited about it.

I am not alone.

American interest in the Olympics in general has been fading over the last decade years. Ratings for the Tokyo summer games were down significantly compared to the Rio games five years earlier. And the TV ratings for Rio were down compared to the London games in 2012. According to NPR:

It's not just the summer games and it's not just COVID-related; the winter games suffered a similar fate in 2018. Variety called the Pyeongchang games "the least watched on record," with viewership down 7% from the 2014 Sochi games. And Sochi's ratings did not compare favorably with the 2010 Vancouver games, according to Deadline.

Turnarounds are always possible. Vancouver's Olympics were a ratings rebound after Torino. And in 2008, the Beijing games were a ratings coup, drawing enormous American viewership according to Nielsen, far outpacing the 2004 Athens games.

But all preliminary signs suggest this year's Beijing Olympics will not be the ratings bonanza it was fourteen years ago. There are plenty of reasons why this might be the case. Some (including NBC!) might point to COVID as a driver, but Olympic ratings were sliding pre-COVID and other major live TV sports seem to be doing alright. (Exhibit A: the exciting AFC and NFC championship football games held this past weekend!) And networks rightfully complain that traditional metrics for measuring viewership are not great at capturing the multi-channel way we consume an event like the Olympics these days; a little Peacock streaming here, a little app-based viewing there, sprinkled in with intermittent watching of conventional cable and broadcast TV.

But there's also a matter of location.

Watch NBC's promotion and you'll notice a conspicuous lack of focus on Beijing as the host city this go-round. (This NewscastStudio analysis breaks it down in greater detail, noting that this is often the case for Winter Olympics cities, though this is also because they're often hosted in less well-known locales.)

The 2008 Beijing games did see some criticism from media watchers. As George Packer wrote for The New Yorker at the time:

The world is very different than it was in 2008, and global public opinion about China is in a very different place. Even before COVID-19 slipped China's borders and became a devastating global pandemic, the tide of public opinion across a multitude of countries was turning against China per Pew.

In the U.S., that shift has been acute. Pew's polling in 2008 found about as many Americans with a positive view of China (39%) as a negative view (42%). As recently as 2006, an outright majority of Americans (52%) reported viewing China favorably. Helpfully, Pew also asked about views of the Chinese people and on this question Americans were overwhelmingly positive (64% favorable), drawing a distinction between a population and its government.

Gallup's polling shows something a little different, with a slim but persistent majority viewing China unfavorably from the early 1990s until today (with the exception of, interestingly, early 2018 - right before the Pyeonchang games in South Korea), but also shows the same sharp turn against China that corresponded with the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. And while Gallup has shown China intermittently trading off with countries like Iran and North Korea for the honor of being "public enemy No. 1" in the minds of Americans over the last decade, today nearly half (45%) of Americans name China in an open-ended question as the greatest enemy of the United States, far outpacing the "silver medalist" Russia (26%).

The Beijing games of 2022 are not happening in the same environment as the Beijing games of 2008. Public opinion worldwide and in the U.S. has soured. Today, 90% of Americans say that China does not respect the personal freedoms of its people. And while most Americans aren't really paying much attention to the diplomatic boycott of the Games, Pew finds they generally lean toward thinking it is a good idea when pressed for an opinion.

Olympics coverage already had a lot of factors working against it - fragmented viewing habits, trends away from watching the Games in the first place - but the locating a major global sporting event in an autocratic country casts a pall over the entire event that makes it even harder to get people excited. Vancouver can bring out Michael Bublé dressed as a Mountie; the Beijing Winter Olympics or the Qatar World Cup raise questions about the use of slave labor.

I'm pulling for American athletes to do their best and showcase their talents on the global stage. And I'm glad American diplomatic figures will be staying home.

If entities like the IOC want to address the decline in Olympic interest, maybe make the task less challenging by choosing locations for the Winter Olympics that have both snow and freedom.

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(Cover Photo Credit: Getty Images/Ian MacNicol)