Most Popular Olympic Sports (2004)
Here is another good measure of the popularity of sports using internet traffic, though it only includes sports that are part of the Summer Olympics. The analysis is of internet traffic to each sport section of the IOC website during 2004, which included the period of the Athens Olympic Games.
Since this analysis was made, the sports of baseball and softball were dropped from the program in 2008 (and since came back again!), in 2016 golf and rugby were added, and other five sports added in 2020. Also, the popularity of sports around the world may have changed since the time this data was first collected.
There are a few other lists of the world's popular sports using internet traffic statistics - based on Wikipedia sport pages and Google search terms. There are also more rankings of popular Olympic Sports, the ranking of most widely played Olympic Sport based on the number of National Federations and the most popular Olympic Sport based on the number of articles published.
Total Page Views to the IOC Website Sections
The table below uses data from the Olympic Program Commission, Report to the 117th IOC Session from 24 May 2005. The data presented is the number of visits to the sport's pages of the IOC website from January 2004 to 11 February 2005. The sport with the most visited page is aquatics, which includes swimming, diving, water polo and synchronized swimming.
The top four sports on the list are the same as the analysis of articles published, though in a different order. This ranking is different from the popularity of Wikipedia sport pages over a longer period, reflecting the apparent temporary popularity of sports such as swimming, athletics and gymnastics at the time of the Olympic Games.
| Rank | Sport | Page Views | % |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Aquatics | 431378 | 10.1 |
| 2 | Gymnastics | 323581 | 7.6 |
| 3 | Athletics | 308596 | 7.2 |
| 4 | Football (Soccer) | 178418 | 4.2 |
| 5 | Volleyball | 176042 | 4.1 |
| 6 | Equestrian | 171517 | 4.0 |
| 7 | Basketball | 163954 | 3.8 |
| 8 | Cycling | 143388 | 3.4 |
| 9 | Shooting | 134099 | 3.1 |
| 10 | Wrestling | 128027 | 3.0 |
| 11 | Archery | 127830 | 3.0 |
| 12 | Taekwondo | 119570 | 2.8 |
| 13 | Modern Pentathlon | 106858 | 2.5 |
| 14 | Tennis | 106297 | 2.5 |
| 15 | Fencing | 105659 | 2.5 |
| 16 | Judo | 103671 | 2.4 |
| 17 | Weightlifting | 101285 | 2.4 |
| 18 | Canoe-kayak | 95637 | 2.2 |
| 19 | Badminton | 92591 | 2.2 |
| 20 | Handball | 91071 | 2.1 |
| 21 | Baseball | 90840 | 2.1 |
| 22 | Field Hockey | 87395 | 2.1 |
| 23 | Rowing | 82834 | 1.9 |
| 24 | Sailing | 79716 | 1.9 |
| 25 | Triathlon | 68937 | 1.9 |
| 26 | Table Tennis | 65159 | 1.8 |
| 27 | Softball | 59570 | 1.6 |
| 28 | Boxing | 13920 | 1.0 |
Table data source: IOC - Olympic Program Commission, Report to the 117th IOC Session, 24 May 2005.
Related Pages
- Most Popular Olympic Sports
- Encyclopedia of all sports of the world
- Analysis of internet traffic to the Wikipedia sport pages and IOC website.
- The most popular marital art using Wikipedia page-views
- Other top 10 lists of the world's most popular sports
- Other world sport lists
Any comments, suggestions, or corrections? Please let us know.
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