Public sentiment towards games

[sharminakter]

The Tokyo Olympics (#Tokyo2020) were mentioned 136,000 times on Twitter in July and August 2021. Interestingly, Rio was also mentioned over 44,000 times. This implies that this year's Summer Olympics were often compared to the 2016 Olympics.

The opening day (July 22) received slightly more attention than the closing day (August 7), with 1.3k tweets with the main hashtag #Tokyo2020.

On those days, the majority of tweets were neutral, with less than 3% expressing negative sentiments. But the opening ceremony triggered 4% more positive tweets than the closing ceremony, which may indicate that interest in the Olympics declined slightly over the course of the Games.

While the general sentiment was rather neutral, analysis of social media posts shows that skepticism about holding the Summer Olympics in the midst of a pandemic was expressed on social media.

The most popular Olympic-related tweet on the day of the opening student data ceremony featured a sarcastic image of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic mascots:

tweet JO tokyo
This tweet received more engagement than the welcome post from the official 2020 Olympics accounts (the second most popular tweet that day).

post opening JO 2020
Sports that saw a spike in popularity during the 2020 Olympics
To find out which sports have seen sudden popularity, we checked search volumes for all sports featured in the Olympic Games, between August 2017 and July 2021. This gave us a good idea of ​​the search trends and interest for each type of sport.