The best way to watch the Olympics is on TikTok

Every night in prime time, NBC broadcasts the day’s highlights from the Paris Olympics to tens of millions of people. Spectators watched the US women’s gymnastics team win gold on a “redemption tour” after winning silver in Tokyo; they were amazed when American swimmer Katie Ledecky finished a race, with her competitors so far behind her that they weren’t even in the frame.

But the most fascinating and eccentric coverage of the Olympics is happening on TikTok.

The appetite for Olympic content was evident before the opening ceremony. For weeks, official Olympic and Paralympic accounts have been sharing videos designed to excite people across different social media platforms. The Olympics (and other major sporting events in general) thrive on stories: narratives like which teams are longtime rivals, what adversity the athletes have faced, and what controversies their sports have made for exciting television — and great marketing hooks. And along with these usual narratives and story arcs, TikTok has become a place for more eccentric or niche subplots, many of which have emerged organically from individual athletes and fans.

For example: have you ever heard of Vila Olímpica’s chocolate muffins? The meme apparently started when Norwegian swimmer Henrik Christiansen posted a video evaluating various foods in the cafeteria and gave an obscenely gooey chocolate muffin an 11/10. Since then, he has made at least 10 videos about Olympic muffins. Now people at the Olympics are running around looking for the muffins. They are hunting for the real muffin brand and begging Costco to import them into the US. There’s nothing deeper here than a candy that looks good and a tech-savvy Olympian who figured out a good trick, but people love it.

A surge in content about the Olympics isn’t unique to TikTok or the Paris Olympics. During the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, American rugby player Ilona Maher gained followers on TikTok as she shared behind-the-scenes clips from the event. But Maher was an anomaly: her content did well because it was new. Now, many TikTok users’ feeds are flooded with Olympics content, not just from the Games’ biggest stars like Maher or gymnast Sunisa Lee. We’re also seeing experimental videos of the Mongolian team’s beautiful uniforms. People are making cute fencers fan cams set to K-pop songs. South Korean sniper Kim Yeji looks so cool that there are TikToks dedicated to it and HQ is writing articles about her style. The vibrations are different this time.

TikTok’s global head of sports partnerships, Rollo Goldstaub, said On the edge in an email stating that the Paris Olympics have “all the right ingredients to be the biggest content moment in TikTok history.” In the first five days of the Tokyo Olympics, 29,000 posts used #olympics, according to Goldstaub. Compare that to the 521,000 #Olympics posts in the first five days of Paris – more than 17 times the amount of content. So far, #olympics has been used in almost 1 million videos.

To state the obvious, these Olympic Games are not like Tokyo, where athletes were isolated and venues were largely empty to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. France is also just six hours ahead of New York – a much more manageable time difference than the 13 hours that separate Japan from the East Coast.

NBC reported a 79 percent jump in TV ratings for the Paris Olympics compared to Tokyo, driven in part by the streaming platform Peacock, which offers full coverage of the Games. The network also hired a cadre of more than two dozen influencers to post Olympics content on social media, including TikTok.

The state of the influencer and content creator industry has also changed since Tokyo, and athletes have copied some of the formats and styles that TikTok viewers are accustomed to. There is GRWM Clips (Get Ready With Me) of Olympic athletes preparing for the opening ceremony; athletes are making unboxing videos of their gear as if they were sharing a Shein collection. It’s the same type of content that floods feeds every day, except in one notable scenario. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the athletes continued to make influencer content after the Paris Olympics.

It’s clear that TikTok is on athletes’ minds too. Moments after winning gold in the team event and still basking in the joy, American gymnasts Lee and Simone Biles were heard discussing which viral TikTok audio tracks they should use in videos. Imagine losing an Olympic medal and then picking up the phone to make a video about it in meme format.

You see, this is the same company that is being pressured by the US government to divest or risk being kicked out of the country. President Joe Biden signed the so-called TikTok ban bill in April, and while it’s still unclear what presumptive Democratic nominee Kamala Harris’s policy stance is, she said the U.S. needs to “deal” with its owner, ByteDance. . Harris, like Biden and other politicians who supported TikTok’s forced divestment bill, recently joined the platform as her presidential campaign progressed.

The push to force Chinese parent company ByteDance to sell TikTok has been tense: Details of confidential briefings are not yet public, although some lawmakers have said the US must take “urgent action” against the company. Politicians who voted to ban TikTok while building their profile on the platform have felt the wrath of users who say it is hypocritical. And while the U.S. must take threats to national security seriously, policymakers also have to contend with the massive information apparatus built on TikTok — an apparatus they also helped sustain.

TikTok is a social media, television, a marketing channel, a shopping mall, a music app, a news platform, and now a 24/7 Olympics live stream. It will take lawmakers more than warning the public about the app’s reported dangers to reverse course.

Disclosure: Comcast, owner of NBCUniversal, is also an investor in Vox Media, On the edgeMother emprise.