Every Tokyo 2021 Olympic sport ranked, from gymnastics to water polo

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every tokyo 2020 olympic sport games ranked list 2021
every tokyo 2020 olympic sport games ranked list 2021

An Olympics in Tokyo that promises more variety than ever before with five new sports (sport climbing, karate, surfing, skateboarding and softball/baseball) and a total of 34 new events, including nine new mixed gender events, across 33 sports in total.

The aim by the International Olympic Committee is to pick a programme that attracts a younger audience, but there is sure to be something on offer for everyone.

With that in mind, Telegraph Sport gives its verdict on the sports that will be contested in Tokyo for this summer's Olympic Games, including breaking some of the larger sports down into individual events.

Tokyo 2021 Olympic sports

47: Sailing

Highly niche sitting-down sport with unintelligible jargon for posh people, made worse on TV by the fact that it’s filmed from about a hundred miles away. Has a key sporting moment happened? Has Sir Ben Ainslie been boarded? Or is that a seal on a rock? Hard to tell.

Rating: needs more pirates.

46: Rhythmic gymnastics

Balancing a ball on yourself is a really cool and impressive trick, if you are an aquatic mammal employed by Sea World. Mucking about with a streamer. Sequins. Tears. Overbearing parents. Feels like Netflix's wildest real life documentary series of 2022 waiting to happen.

Rating: only a legitimate sporting option if you failed at clown college.

45: Basketball

Gee, who do you think will win?

Rating: USA! USA! USA!

44: Basketball 3x3

There’s more? If you’ve ever watched a basketball match, in which five tall people face off against five other tall people, and thought, “you know what, I could really get into this if there just two fewer tall people each side” then, well, have we got the sport for you! The organisers are promising “an urban atmosphere”.

Rating: urban, sure. What about rural basketballers, though?

It&#39;s basketball, but even less players - AP
It's basketball, but even less players - AP

43: Football

Come off it, football. You’ve got your own world competitions and professional leagues, and everyone pays attention to you all the time. This is very needy.

Rating: let someone else have a look-in, eh?

42: Shooting

The disappointing ‘pew’ of an air-pistol and, some metres away, a slightly punctured piece of paper.

Rating: off target

41: Marathon swimming

Gruelling for the competitors, worse for the spectators. Sadly reminiscent of a million boring newspaper features about how the writer discovered wild swimming in lockdown and felt an enormous sense of perspective and peace. Give it a rest, Tabitha. Nobody’s interested in your underwater midlife crisis.

Rating: as much fun as a bit of cold, clammy seaweed wrapped around your leg.

40: Modern pentathlon

Featuring the five universal athletic pursuits of fencing, polo, owning a castle, emotional repression and braying.

Rating: the Corinthian Ideal, now dominated by former Soviets, like owning property in London.

39: BMX racing

Like normal bicycle racing, only with your knees up around your ears and a bumpier track.

Rating: Crash, bang, wallop

38: BMX freestyle

Hello fellow kids. The Olympics is really wicked, as you young people say.

Rating: aren’t you a bit old for this?

37: Judo

The noble and ancient Japanese art of trying to untuck each other’s pyjamas.

Rating: it’s Coming Home.

An emotional homecoming for judo - GETTY IMAGES
An emotional homecoming for judo - GETTY IMAGES

36: Volleyball

The second best volleyball sport in the entire Olympics.

Rating: congratulations, vanilla volleyball, you got silver.

35: Golf

Much like tennis and football, this should simply be banned on the basis that it is not the pinnacle of the sport. At least it’s quite socially distanced.

Rating: nobody cares. Golfers don’t even care.

34: Softball/baseball

Well done, America. What corporate day-out bonding exercise shall we have in the next Olympics? Raft-building? Escape room? Bitter, heavy drinking on expenses in a Travelodge off the A1?

Rating: it’s rounders, guys. Come on.

33: Equestrian: Eventing and Showjumping

Love the smart red, white and black outfits, all very Jilly Cooper. Sort of sport Britain normally does well at, its mixture of very high barriers to entry, fancy dress and twee garden design playing right into our hands.

Rating: disaster! Freddie Ringbinder-Pillock and Big Punisher have come a cropper at the sugar cubes.

32: Archery

Over-engineered gear takes the magic out of what should be a tremendously back to basics sport: a properly ancient pastime. Make it better by having every archer dress up as Robin Hood, Katniss Everdeen, Hawkeye from Avengers etc.

Rating: not a bullseye

Bows and arrows - GETTY IMAGES
Bows and arrows - GETTY IMAGES

31: Triathlon

A mid-life crisis turned into a televised sport.

Rating: just looks so, so tiring.

30: Canoe sprint

Quite clearly not the fastest way to propel a boat, but has a pleasingly eccentric look to it and you sense there could be some epic arguments when boat buddies don’t paddle in unison.

Rating: poor man’s Hiawatha.

29: Skateboarding

Fun, accessible, relatively easy to have a go at yourself. Clear attempt to hook in a younger audience. Surely only a matter of time before videogaming gets a go, possibly TikTok content creation.

Rating: is Tony Hawk still involved?

Tapping into that younger audience - REUTERS
Tapping into that younger audience - REUTERS

28: Taekwondo

Has its moments but never quite matches up to the video game – Street Fighter – on which it was originally based on. Wearing giant pillows around tummy seems a bit wet.

Rating: karate would kick its pillow off.

27: Mountain Biking

One for the nutters, can be quite exciting, loses points because it is essentially going for a hired bike ride, only you cannot stop at a country pub on way.

Rating: going to be sore in the morning.

26: Badminton

Sure, it looks like the sort of game that would be nice on the lawn with everyone wearing a long dress or sensible tailored slacks and passing round barley water. Until someone from Malaysia hits a bit of cork into your eye from eight feet.

Rating: the tangy sadness of sports halls.

25: Artistic swimming

Occasionally produces delightful Busby Berkeley overhead shots, sometimes makes you just worry for the anxiety levels of the practitioners.

Rating: what a shame, Janine was a centimetre out on the golden lotus panorama, and now the whole team is disqualified.

24: Tennis

Tennis’s fifth most prestigious prize, sixth if you count getting a plum BBC job alongside Tiger Tim and Sue Barker.

Rating: needs more Naomi Osaka.

23: Fencing

Arcane, elitist, almost too quick to watch on TV, rules impenetrable to the outsider, tactics ditto, vaguely fruity. And yet those outfits! Those facemasks! Swordplay! Being wired to the mains while you win prizes! Fencing, you weird posh rascal.

Rating: easily the kinkiest Olympic sport

22: Water polo

Ferocious people from the Balkans sorting out their differences with ear defenders on, the tantalising prospect of blood in the water, the terrified helplessness of the keeper, the prospect of ducking, pushing, bombing, and petting in the shallow end.

Rating: a visceral, splashy thrill.

Give me the ball - SHUTTERSTOCK
Give me the ball - SHUTTERSTOCK

21: Handball

Stick the plumper in goal. Chuck ball at head. Repeat.

Rating: send for Fatty Foulke.

20: Sport Climbing

A new entry this time: these people are really good at getting up things quickly. Sport is surely crying out for a backstory/scandal about a medal winner being a reformed cat burglar. One of several Olympic sports (boxing, shooting, synchronised finger-smithing) where a criminal past would be a great preparation.

Rating: not one for the acrophobic.

19: Trampoline gymnastics

Bringing the leisure centre to the international sporting stage. Trampoline is a fun and wholesome activity for all age groups and, a bit like its Winter Olympics spirit animal luge, looks like it could just happen to you rather than you having to actively do it.

Rating: meaty, beaty, big and bouncy.

18: Beach volleyball

Other volleyball’s cooler cousin. A sport anyone can have a go at if they've got a ball, a bathing costume, and a beach.

Rating: most dramatic sand-based spectacle since Lawrence of Arabia.

17: Road cycling

Not as good as the Tour de France, but Britain is always in with a shout.

Rating: giant pile-up always a possible.

16: Surfing

Surfing finally gets a chance at the Olympics. Reliant on getting decent waves. Hoping for some excellent “woah dude” post-event interviews with the competitors.

Rating: rad.

15: Wrestling

Grapplin’! And not the kind where drugged up 300 pound actors hit each other with folding chairs. Hard, oiled men from Kazakhstan holding each other down until one of them begs for mercy. One of those sports where you’re just really glad to be watching from thousands of miles away.

Rating: specialist interest.

14: Table tennis

Quite rare Olympic sport in that most people have had a go at some time, possibly on a camp site, possibly in a youth club. Makes you appreciate how amazing Olympians are at things, a sense of connection that you don’t get with, say, pole vault.

Rating: the most 1970s sport on offer. Strong orange squash and Wagon Wheel vibes.

13: Hockey

Gloriously vivid royal blue pitch can give you the impression that you are watching Premier League Years during an acid flashback, Great Britain seem good at it, it’s enough like football that you can pick up the ebb and flow. Epic face masks.

Rating: where were the Germans, but frankly who cares?

12: Rowing

Almost every article or TV feature at rowing seems defensively quick to claim that “it’s not just posh people at Oxbridge, you know, ahahaha”. Whatever you say, your grace. Actually televises quite well because it scrolls horizontally like an old fashioned Daley Thompson Decathlon game.

Rating: which one's Cambridge?

11: Swimming

Most of us have done it, and these people do it without being shouted at by a sadistic games teacher, being made to pick up a brick, or getting a verruca. You could argue there are too many events: if you fell out of a boat, you wouldn’t really care if you got to the life raft via doggy paddle or like a frog, would you?

Rating: Enjoy an incredibly hot drink in a tiny beige cup from the vending machine afterwards.

Adam Peaty is a swimming superhero - AFP
Adam Peaty is a swimming superhero - AFP

10: Karate

New for this Games; mildly surprising that it hasn’t been in before when judo and taekwondo have. The film’s not called The Judo Kid, is it? There isn’t a 1970s men’s fragrance called Hai Taekwondo, was there? Maybe they should settle it with a big multidisciplinary fight.

Rating: the best of the fighty sports? Certainly the one most imitated in the playground, which has to count for something.

9: Rugby Sevens

Yes austerity rugby. But there’s loads of scoring because the pitch is so massive and the little mini Mars bar sized scrum is cute.

Rating: God, it looks tiring though, on that pitch.

8: Diving

Abs you could open a can of soup with, the weird co-dependency of the synchro pair, dear old Tom Daley still plugging away. Isn’t it? Marvellous.

Rating: mind your head.

7: Canoe slalom

Wave machine high jinks, looks like a right laugh, only takes about a minute and a half, Britain won gold last time. Eskimo Rolls look fun.

Rating: continuing to rehabilitate canoeing’s reputation after Deliverance.

6: Boxing

The sweet science, as performed by rock hard little brawlers from Cuba. Fun to watch the amateur stars of the future before they go pro, a bit like Masterchef.

Rating: serious contender.

5: Weightlifting

Would you like to watch a very tiny Turk lift a Renault Espace above their head? Of course you would.

Rating: snatchtastic.

4: Track cycling

Compelling to watch, the lovely bank of the track, the overhead shots, the sleek futuristic helmets. GB rule. To the outsider, feels like they might be making up events while drunk. “Let’s have one where everyone chases a motorcycle”… “What about one where they do a million laps of the track?”… “Make three of them go on a bike at once”…

Rating: I can’t tell what happened, but apparently it’s another medal for Team GB.

The British medal factory - AFP
The British medal factory - AFP

3: Artistic gymnastics

So elegant, so difficult, so cruel, so capricious. Land of the four foot nine superhero.

Rating: flippin' good

2: Athletics

With no disrespect to the other 46 sports on this list, you could bin off each and every one of them and you’d still have an Olympics as long as you had track and field. You don’t need stuff, you don’t have to be rich, you just have to have talent and will. The greatest.

Rating: suspend disbelief, marvel, celebrate the human spirit.

1: Equestrian Dressage

They made a horse dance to Santana. What sort of twisted genius comes up with that?

Rating: the greatest sport horsekind has yet devised, the Champion the wonder horse of the whole Olympics. The gold medal.
