The appeal to me as a youngster was seeing a lot of sports that normally didn't get the broadcast time. Grew up without cable and ESPN, so Wide World of Sports was about the only time we ever saw things beyond hoops, bats, or goalposts.

Allowing pros to compete seemed a cheap ploy to draw casual eyes to sports that really didn't need as much attention. The onset of performance enhancement via supplements or worse soured me on caring about most events. The addition of so many mainstream sports or x-games adjacent stuff made it "SSDD" for me.

I haven't cared about olympics since the 80s, honestly, but tend more to the winter events; That might be because in the summer I'd rather be outside doing the things they are doing like kayaking, volleyball, etc, and the winter we are all huddled up under a blanket trying to put off shoveling yet again. If bobsled/luge is on, I'm watching. Heck, I'll even tune in to curling.

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