Power ranking every single sport at the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics

33. Marathon Swimming

Swimming is a wonderful sport and one of the reasons people tune into the Summer Olympics. Some of the biggest stars at the Olympic Games are swimmers, both men and women. Mark Spitz. Katie Ledecky. Ian Thorpe. Kristin Otto. Michael Phelps. These are athletes who found a niche that made them beyond famous. That’s not the reality for marathon swimmers. 

While the actual structure of the sport is the same, the elements are just much, much different. Let’s start with the obvious. Marathon swimming is much longer, and therefore, it takes much longer from start to finish. Florian Wellbrock of Germany won the gold medal in Tokyo. It took him 1:48:33.7. For those doing the math, that’s one hour, 48 minutes, and 33.7 seconds. He beat the silver medalist by more than 25 seconds. 

When a sport not only takes close to two hours, when there are literally dozens of sports that are judged in seconds but also chooses winners and losers with quite a bit of time in between, it’s hard to have the same amount of interest as other sports. It’s just so long of the same thing. There’s not a lot of drama, although every so often, there’s an insane ending. At the U.S. Open Water National Championship, three men were within one-tenth of a second at the end.

If that was the norm, this sport would be higher. It’s just not. More often, the gold medalist had this in the bag for a while. As long as they coasted to the finish, it was in the bag. That doesn’t tend to translate to good ratings.