Carrying the Torch 🔥

OLYMPICS CORNER 🥇

We’re so Back 📺

Flashback to 2021. The world’s climbing out of the big sick, social unrest throughout the country, and a new president. The last thing people were thinking about was the Tokyo Olympics. 😴

The first week of those 2021 Summer Games garnered “only” 19 million US viewers on average; people were worried the Olympics were down bad.

Not so fast…

Viewership at the Paris Olympics has come out of the gate extremely hot with first-week viewership up 79% to 34 million as NBC now makes the Games available all day. From when you wake up and start watching live events to the moment you drift off to primetime “re-packaged” Olympic highlights, there’s no shortage of opportunities to get eyeballs 👀 on the event. For context, this 34 million viewers mark is comparable to:

🏈 NFL Wild Card Playoff games: 38M
📺 Barbara Walters interviews Monica Lewinsky: 48M
👔 First 2024 presidential debate: 51M

Not exactly apples to apples but you get the point!

Drivers Seat 🚗

We’ve been posting daily Olympic medal counts on our social accounts here; this is the updated chart as of yesterday at 5 PM.

The Old and the New ⏳

48 events are part of the 2024 Olympics, but that list is very fluid. Only 4 of the events this year have taken place in every single Olympic games since 1896: 

🏊 Swimming
🏃 Track and Field
🤺 Fencing
🤸 Gymnastics

The newest events are Breaking (breakdancing), Surfing, Sport Climbing, Skateboarding, BMX Freestyle, and 3×3 Basketball, all of which have been added in the last two Games.

To become an Olympic Sport is no walk in the park; there’s a multi-step process starting with sport “recognition” by the Olympic committee, then application to the Olympics, and finally criteria evaluation. Here’s a thread on how it works and why chess isn’t allowed.

VIDEO CATCHUP ⏮️

Katie Ledecky’s continued domination 🏊

NBA Media Rights Explained 🏀

EXTRAS 📊

MLB Trade Deadline 🤝

The MLB trade deadline was Tuesday, marking the last time teams can transact before the playoff push with a locked-in roster 🔒

We wondered which teams trade together 👯 the most and who the most prolifically trading teams are. We grabbed every trade over the last five years from Spotrac and visualized the connections between teams, pulling out the top partners in each division. Some initial findings:

🐟 The Tampa Bay Rays have made the most trades while the Washington Nationals have made the least

🤝 The most common trade partners are the Mariners/Giants and Dodgers/Rays

The chart itself is ultra confusing (and we know that) but the data is super interesting to understand how “loose” teams are with trades. We have a divisional breakdown here with some more details and team analysis.