My sense is the choice of new events for the Olympics is based on:
- Easy to televise.
- Good visuals.
- Popular enough to draw sponsors.
- Incremental gain in audience.
So we get “sports” offering the virtues of ski acrobatics … That suggests the ultimate money-maker and audience-builder would be video gamers …
“… marksmanship is an Olympic sport, right? That’s twitching the fingers as well,” says Edward Castronova, a professor at Indiana University who studies and teaches the economics and sociology of video games. …
As I recollect it, big money began to creep into sports into the late 1960’s. …