The 2004 Olympic games are drawing to a close. Although I failed to catch much of the TV coverage, I really didn’t miss much of this year’s events.

Nick Gillespie opines:

Once arguably the world’s premier sporting spectacle, the games, in both their winter and summer versions, no longer command the cultural attention they once enjoyed. Ratings in the U.S. may be up from the Sydney games, but it’s clear that the Olympics, like so much else in a world characterized by cultural proliferation, an ever-growing list of options for expression and enjoyment, just don’t matter the way they used to. As recently as 20 years ago, it seemed as if the world stopped to watch the Olympics. But no more. [...]

The Olympics were to regular sports coverage what Howard Johnson, with its dazzling 28 flavors, was to the old vanilla-only Dairy Queen. The Olympics literally paraded in front of Americans a procession of strange, wonderful athletes from faraway lands, people with strange names, faces, and talents. Figures such as the barefooted Abebe Bikila from Ethiopia, say, the first runner to win two Olympic marathons; Klaus Dibiasi, the legendary Italian diver who was the first to win three successive golds in his field; and Nadia Comenici, the Romanian gymnast who pulled no fewer than seven perfect scores during the ’76 Games (that she scored one to the strains of the theme from the soap opera The Young & the Restless makes her accomplishment that much more impressive).

But in an increasingly globalized world, one in which goods and people migrate without a second thought, such variety and such mixing is an everyday occurrence. An ever-growing number of niche cable channels deliver ever-more tailored sports content and the World Wide Web caters to every possible fetish, in sports every bit as much as porn. Compared to 30 years ago, it’s a much smaller globe—and a far more interesting world. But in such a setting, the Olympics lose a good deal of what the ad men would call their “unique selling proposition.”

Why wait every four years?