Follow The Telegraph’s Olympics opening ceremony live blog from Paris 2024.
Keeping up with each discipline at the Paris Olympics could be bewildering. Indeed, just staying on top of the schedule and the best platforms on which to follow it is a tough-enough challenge.
Figuring out which events deserve the most attention, and what ones promise to be less appealing, are tasks that quite probably demand some assistance. To which end, we’ve ranked and rated every one...
Not very watchable, hard to see who is who and what they are doing, other than swimming a really long way. Unfortunately triggers flashbacks to lockdown and endless, very worthy articles about the mental health benefits of wild swimming. Making banana bread hasn’t crept into the Olympics too, has it?
A traditional British powerhouse, both in terms of medals and of being the medium through which the UK imposed its will on the rest of the globe thanks to the British Navy. Sorry about that, everybody. Lot of sitting down, lot of confusing rules, very little playing of the Village People’s In The Navy. Might well be an amazing sport, but it is rubbish to watch on telly.
Balancing a ball on yourself is a really cool and impressive trick, if you are a seal at SeaWorld. Mucking about with a streamer. Sequins. Tears. Overbearing parents.
A lovely activity for a nine-year-old in the back garden but not really a sport. A fun and wholesome activity for all age groups and, a bit like its Winter Olympics spirit animal the luge, looks like it could just happen to you rather than you having to actively do it.
Superbly plummy five-timer featuring the traditional upper-crust countryside pursuits of fencing, polo, owning a castle, emotional repression and braying.
An exciting opportunity for plucky little USA to get on the medal table, by sweeping the board in a sport only they really play (and a few Greeks and Serbians).
There’s more? If you’ve ever watched a basketball match, in which five tall people face off against five other tall people, and thought, “I could really get into this if there were just two fewer tall people each side,” then, well, have we got the sport for you.
Come off it, football. You’ve got your own world and continental competitions and professional leagues, and everyone pays attention to you all the time. This is very needy, let someone else have a moment in the sun.
Strangely unexciting, a small pop, a small mark on a piece of paper 10 metres away. Obvious ways to make it a more watchable spectacle suggest themselves but won’t pass muster with the IOC snowflakes.
Smart and saucy red, white and black outfits, all very Jilly Cooper. Sort of sport Britain normally does well at, its mixture of very high barriers to entry (not a pun), fancy dress and twee garden design playing right into our hands. Keep an eye out for veteran British medal hope Freddie Ringbinder-Pillock, 72, and his long-time equine companion Ghostface Killah.
Like normal bicycle racing, only with your knees up around your ears and a bumpier track. Looks really fun.
The noble and ancient Japanese art of trying to untuck each other’s pyjamas.
The Sevens version, not the full 15-person affair. Quite a good game, loads of scoring because the pitch is so massive and the little mini Mars bar-sized scrum is cute. Quite clearly not the best rugby players in the world doing it so loses points.
The second-best volleyball sport in the entire Olympics.
Scoring highly with the vaguely Gladiators vibe to it. Taking place this time at the Eiffel Tower park. What’s not to like?
Much like tennis and football, should not be encouraged on the basis that it is not the pinnacle of the sport.
How do you do, fellow kids. The Olympics is really wicked, as you young people say. Actually turned out to be a real hit last time, some death-defying leaps and twirls and flips. Britain likely to do well again.
Over-engineered gear takes the magic out of what should be a tremendously back-to-basics sport: a properly ancient pastime. Make it better by having every archer dress up as Robin Hood, Katniss Everdeen, Hawkeye from Avengers etc.
The middle-manager’s mid-life crisis turned into a televised sport.
Quite clearly not the fastest way to propel a boat, but has a pleasingly eccentric look to it and you sense there could be some epic arguments when boat buddies don’t paddle in unison.
Fun, accessible, relatively easy to have a go at yourself. Clear attempt to hook in a younger audience. Surely only a matter of time before TikTok content creation gets a spin.
Has its moments but never quite matches up to the video game – Street Fighter – on which it was originally based. Wearing giant pillows around the tummy seems a bit wet.
One for those lacking the self-preservation gene. Can be quite exciting, loses points because it is essentially going for a hired bike ride, only you cannot stop at a country pub on the way.
Sure, it looks like the sort of game that would be nice on the lawn with everyone wearing a long dress or sensible tailored slacks and serving barley water. Until someone from Malaysia hits a bit of cork into your eye from eight feet.
Occasionally produces delightful Busby Berkeley overhead shots, very much the aesthete’s choice.
As in breakdancing. New for Paris 2024. Billed as being one for the kidz, although quite rare to hear someone not born in the 1970s or 1980s ever mention breakdancing so we’ll see.
Tennis’s fifth-most prestigious prize, sixth if you count getting a nice little earner on the BBC’s Today At Wimbledon coverage.
Arcane, elitist, almost too quick to watch on TV, rules impenetrable to the outsider, tactics ditto, swishy theatrics hint at an absolute viper’s nest of behind-the-scenes dramas. Some of sport’s greatest outfits. Masquerade-ball style anonymity with the face-guards. Being wired to the mains while you win prizes. Fencing, you weird posh rascal.
Plumpest one goes in goal, chuck the ball at them. Like Lord of the Flies, but with the tangy sadness of sports halls.
Ferocious people from the Balkans sorting out their differences with ear defenders on, the tantalising prospect of blood in the water, the terrified helplessness of the keeper, the prospect of ducking, pushing, bombing, and petting in the shallow end.
Got a trial run at the last Olympics and is again strutting its stuff. Cat burglars worldwide should get involved. Gladiators vibes, too. A welcome addition.
Not as good as the Tour de France, but Britain is often in with a shout.
Reliant on decent waves; the organisers obviously figured that they won’t be getting these on the Seine so this will be taking place in, er, Teahupo’o reef pass, Tahiti, French Polynesia. This is a record, not surprisingly, for the furthest an Olympic event has taken place from a host city.
Grapplin’! Brutal, oiled men from Kazakhstan holding each other down until one of them begs for mercy. One of those sports where you’re just really glad to be watching from hundreds of miles away.
Quite rare Olympic sport, in that most people have had a go at some time, possibly on a camp site, possibly in a youth club. Makes you appreciate how amazing Olympians are at things, a sense of connection that you don’t get with, say, the pole vault. The most 1970s sport on offer. Strong orange squash and Wagon Wheel vibes.
Gloriously vivid royal blue pitch can give you the impression that you are watching Premier League Years during an acid flashback. Great Britain seem good at it. It’s enough like football that you can pick up the ebb and flow. Epic face masks. Inspiration for one of the great Olympics commentary moments in “where were the Germans, but frankly who cares?”
Almost every article or TV feature on rowing seems defensively quick to insist that “it’s not just posh people at Oxbridge, you know, ahahaha”. Sure, whatever you say, your grace. Actually televises quite well because it scrolls horizontally like an old fashioned Daley Thompson’s Decathlon game. Presumably Britain will be right up there as usual.
Most of us have done it, and these people do it without being shouted at by a sadistic games teacher, being made to pick up a brick, or getting a verruca. You could argue there are too many events: if you fell out of a boat, you wouldn’t really care if you got to the life raft via doggy paddle or like a frog, would you? Not sure if they get to enjoy an incredibly hot drink in a tiny beige cup from the vending machine afterwards. Hope so.
The sweet science, as performed by rock-hard brawlers from Cuba. Fun to watch the amateur stars of the future before they turn pro, a bit like Masterchef.
Abs you could open a can of soup with, the weird co-dependency of the synchro pair, dear old Tom Daley. Isn’t it? Marvellous.
Wave machine high jinks, looks like a right laugh, only takes about a minute and a half, Britain is a reliable source of gold medals. Eskimo rolls look fun. Continues to rehabilitate canoeing’s reputation after Deliverance.
Would you like to watch a very tiny Turk lift a Renault Espace above their head? Of course you would. In terms of spectacle and accessibility, this is as pure and simple as it gets.
Compelling to watch, the lovely bank of the track, the overhead shots, the sleek futuristic helmets. GB reliable champs. To the outsider, feels like they might be making up events for a bet. “Let’s have one where everyone chases a motorcycle”… “What about one where they do a million laps of the track?”… “Make three of them go on a bike at once”… Often hard to tell exactly what has happened, but it’s usually another medal for Team GB.
So elegant, so difficult, so cruel, so capricious. The realm of the 4ft 9in superhero.
With no disrespect to the other 46 sports on this list, you could bin off each and every one of them and you’d still have an Olympics as long as you had track and field. You don’t need stuff, you don’t have to be rich, you just have to have talent and will. The greatest. Suspend disbelief, marvel, celebrate the human spirit.
Making a horse vibe to Soft Cell’s Tainted Love, as Germany’s Kristina Sprehe did with her four-legged dance partner Desperados in the 2012 Olympics? Oh yes. The greatest sport horsekind has yet devised, the Champion the Wonder Horse of the whole Olympics, and the worthy recipient of our gold medal. Despite recent events.
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