It’s hard to see the future… unless you make it yourself.
We are doing just that, and we do it by imagining what will come.
Here is an article that we imagine reading in the future, because of what we did.

This is not what we want to see… it is a cautionary tale.

DATELINE: JULY 2050

Does Anyone Remember the Olympic Games?

By The New Yorker | July 2050

On a humid evening in Paris last summer, a small crowd gathered near the Eiffel Tower to watch a projected montage of archival footage: Jesse Owens sprinting in Berlin in 1936, Nadia Comăneci’s perfect ten in Montreal, Usain Bolt grinning before the gun. The event had been billed as a “Celebration of Olympic History.” There were folding chairs, a temporary screen, and a scattering of tourists who stopped, watched for a few minutes, and moved on.

No one under thirty lingered.

This was not unusual. By mid-century, the Olympic Games occupy a strange cultural position—revered in retrospect, politely acknowledged in official circles, but largely absent from the lived experience of younger generations. They are remembered the way people remember transatlantic steamships or network television: once essential, now ceremonial.

The Olympic Games did not collapse. They thinned.

The Slow Unraveling

The decline was not caused by scandal, corruption, or even money. Broadcast contracts remained lucrative into the late 2030s. Host cities continued to compete, though with increasing reluctance. The problem was subtler and therefore harder to arrest: the Games no longer felt participatory, or even adjacent, to how most people lived.

Youth sports systems had already been eroding for decades—priced out, over-specialised, and concentrated among the affluent. Esports, briefly imagined as a generational bridge, solved for viewership but not for physical engagement or belonging. By the time the IOC formally launched the Olympic Esports Games in the late 2020s, the audience they were trying to reach had already moved on.

What younger people wanted was not spectacle. It was inclusion, recognition, and continuity—ways to do sport rather than watch it.

The Olympic movement, built on selection and scarcity, could not easily supply those things at scale.

The Rise of Something Else

The alternative did not announce itself as a replacement. It emerged, as many durable systems do, at the margins.

By the early 2030s, The Everyone Sport—known simply as E-ONE—had spread quietly through schools, universities, community centres, and workplaces. Its premise was deceptively simple: everyone plays; effort counts; contribution accumulates.

Its flagship discipline, Racket:Next, required no stadiums and no teams in the traditional sense. Players stood alone, in small physical spaces, wearing lightweight virtual-reality headsets. What connected them was not proximity but structure: individual performances rolled up into collective scores that could represent a class, a city, or an entire country.

There were no trials. No benches. No waiting to be chosen.

Participation scaled without spectatorship. Millions played who had never watched a professional match of anything.

For sociologists, the shift was striking. Sport, long organised vertically—elite at the top, mass audiences below—had reorganised horizontally. Communities formed around shared effort rather than shared allegiance. The language of fandom gave way to the language of contribution.

What the Olympics Could Not Be

The IOC was not blind to these developments. In fact, it engaged with E-ONE earlier than many now remember, recognising its global competitions as Olympic-adjacent in the late 2020s. But integration had limits.

The Olympic Games, by design, are episodic. They concentrate meaning into a few weeks every four years. E-ONE, by contrast, was continuous. It operated year-round, everywhere, without hosts or bids. It did not culminate so much as persist.

This difference proved decisive.

By the 2040s, young athletes increasingly defined themselves not by the dream of Olympic selection—a pathway so narrow it bordered on fictional—but by their standing within E-ONE’s global participation ecosystem. Recognition came early and often, not as medals but as milestones of effort and consistency.

The Olympics, once the apex of sporting aspiration, became a specialised event for a shrinking class of ultra-elite competitors and nostalgic audiences.

Memory as Ceremony

In 2048, the IOC staged what it described as a “Heritage Games” in Athens: a reduced-format event featuring track, swimming, and gymnastics, framed explicitly as a tribute to Olympic history. Attendance was respectable. The opening ceremony was elegant. But the global moment—the sense that the world had paused together—never materialised.

Meanwhile, tens of millions logged their daily performances into E-ONE’s system, barely aware that the Heritage Games were taking place.

This is how institutions fade now—not with collapse, but with indifference.

What Replaced the Games

E-ONE never claimed to inherit the Olympics’ symbolism. It did not promise unity through flags or anthems. Instead, it offered something more prosaic and, in the end, more durable: a way for people to remain physically engaged, socially connected, and meaningfully recognised in a world where work, identity, and community had become increasingly abstract.

In an era shaped by artificial intelligence and remote life, sport turned out to be one of the last irreducibly human domains. E-ONE understood this early. The Olympic movement, constrained by its own magnificence, did not.

The Question That Remains

Do people remember the Olympic Games?

Yes—much as they remember grand cathedrals in cities they no longer inhabit. With respect. With affection. With distance.

What they do not remember is how it felt to belong to them.

That feeling, it turns out, migrated elsewhere.