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Olympics 2021: 5 Positive Takeaways From The Tokyo Games

Tue, 10 Aug 2021 19:44:48 GMT

Sports Fans Keep Making The World Better

After a year’s delay and much consternation with economic and coronavirus issues, the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, rescheduled for 2021, are now part of history, and frankly came off better than almost any pundits expected. But that is not too surprising given that those pundits, including most mainstream Western media, were overwhelmingly, unnecessarily and in many cases ignorantly negative about the Games to begin with, and I got the feeling that many of my sports writing colleagues were hoping for a big failure so they could say they were right.

That didn’t happen, and now that the Games are over, despite no spectators, and the unfortunate loss of billions of dollars in projected tourism revenue for the host nation (which would have been lost whether or not the Games continued) it’s important to consider all the positive, and in many cases lasting, effects of the Tokyo Olympic Games. Here are my top 5, in no particular order:

1. Japan’s Jackie Robinson Moment: Little mention was made in coverage of Japan’s longstanding racism issues and history of discrimination against citizens born to mixed race families, known derisively as “hafu,” meaning half breed. In recent years the best tool for progress in combatting this systemic racism has proven to be the success and popularity of mixed-race Japanese athletes, from baseball star Yu Darvish to the suddenly beloved Naomi Osaka. The choice of Osaka to light the Olympic cauldron, a very high honor that at our last Summer Games was reserved for national hero Muhammed Ali, marked a big turning point and put this issue front and center on the national sportive stage, not unlike when Jackie Robinson first came out onto the baseball field in his Brooklyn Dodgers uniform, shattering a major barrier. The momentum continued when Team Japan’s Aaron Wolf, born to one American parent, won gold in Judo, one of the most culturally important events of the Games to the Japanese audience. There is a lot more on the subject, and the role of spectator sports in combatting racism generally, in my book , and during the Games I wrote this Op-Ed for USA Today that elicited a lot of fan mail from Japanese readers.

2. The Participation Effect: No one watches an NFL Football games and is suddenly inspired to put on gear and get sacked by a big, fast, powerful athlete. But there are a handful of sports that simply seeing on television leads the audience to pursue, and when spectators on the couch are converted into active participants, those who study the role of spectator sports (like me) call this “the participation effect.” There are many examples, but the best are the Olympics, which every two years inspire a surge in gym memberships, fitness class participation, and new participants in sports showcased at the Games but rarely seen otherwise, from triathlon and swimming to the newcomers, surfing and rock climbing. With an obesity crisis in this too sedentary country, and other parts of the world, leading to all sorts of related dangerous health conditions such as diabetes, anything that gets people off the couch and moving has a high value to society, and the Olympics have been proven to do just that. You can watch this fun animated segment I did on the Dr. Oz Show to explain the participation effect here.

3. Showcasing Women’s Sports: It’s not even remotely close - there is no other time when so many female athletes get as much exposure as at the Olympics, from team sports to individuals. It is well established that the past success of the Women’s US Soccer Team drove hundreds of thousands of young American women into soccer, a paradigm shift across the elementary and high school sports scene in this country. Exposer to women athlete role models continues to drive participation and benefit younger generations and record shattering performances by the likes of Katie Ledecky and Allyson Felix put big exclamation points on that trend. The shocking Gold medal race by 17-year old Alaskan high school student Lydia Jacoby - and peer reaction replayed over and over around the world - reaffirmed to teenage girls everywhere that when it comes to sports, dreams can come true.

4. LGBTQ Rights: In my book I relate the story of professional freeskier and Olympic medalist Gus Kenworthy, who became the first openly gay athlete in the so-called “action sports” community, then returned to the Korean Winter Games as the rare openly gay competitor. It seems hard to believe that it was at those same Games - just 3 years ago - that skater Adam Rippon became the first openly gay American man to medal. But while progress should have happened faster and sooner, the Olympics have become a prominent global stage for this issue. Not too long ago, the “normal” total of openly LGTBQ athletes hovered around zero. By Beijing 2008, it was considered “progress” that a record eleven LGTBQ athletes participated. That number more than doubled for London 2012, more than doubled again for Rio 2016, and hit new record highs for Tokyo. This big global stage has real impact, and in 2018, as the Games loomed, Tokyo’s city government passed an ordinance protecting LGTBQ people from discrimination, echoing the words of the Olympic Charter. Competition may run only a few weeks, but that is a lasting change for the better. Before the Games began, IOC President Thomas Bach dedicated the opening of Tokyo’s Pride House, a new LGBTQ community center, noting that, “In sport we are all equal.” Weeks after his pronouncement, Canada’s Quinn became the first openly trans athlete to take home Gold.

5. Mental Health Awareness: The issue of mental health struggles among top athletes was moving into the spotlight before the Games, thanks in large part to former record setting Olympian Michael Phelps and Team Japan’s star Naomi Osaka. But when Simone Biles, widely considered the greatest gymnast of all time, shocked the world by withdrawing from events last minute to take care of her mental health, the topic became front page news all over the globe. While Biles’ decision sparked a small firestorm of ignorant and misguided criticism, not surprisingly from those who had no relevant knowledge or understanding of her situation, support quickly became widespread, and many other prominent Olympians like swimmer Simone Manuela and sprinter Noah Lyles - who spoke about mental health immediately after winning Bronze - quickly stepped up. So have athletes outside the Games. This topic has quickly gone from simmering below the surface to full public boil, in a good way, and while the spotlight has been on the mental health of athletes, these are high profile role models whose ordeals and admissions inspire all those non-athletes as well. The big win is for awareness of mental health issues period, not awareness of such issues in sports, and as a recent Vox headline proclaimed, “America’s mental health moment is finally here. There’s a mental health moment in America, and athletes are leading the way.”

New List of Best Sports Book from "For Authors" Site

larryolmsted@gmail.com — Mon, 28 Jun 2021 15:00:26 GMT

Best Books For Sports Fans of all types

This great website compiles lists of the Best Books by topic chosen by renowned authors - they call it "Like Browsing the Best Bookstore in the World." Check out this new list of the Best Books for Sports Fans

Sports Fans: Does Ice Cream Really Taste Better When Your Team Wins?

Sun, 28 Mar 2021 21:12:59 GMT

They say victory is sweet, and some scientists at Cornell University set out to prove it.

The school’s Department of Food Science is known for wacky experiments into often subconscious eating habits, such as building self-filling bowls that add more food from the bottom, then watching to see whether people will stop eating when full or simply finish whatever portion is put in front of them.

But one 2015 experiment targeted sports fans. Associate Professor Robin Dando handed out free ice cream samples at hockey games all season long to track whether fans’ taste perceptions changed along with the final score. It turned out there was indeed a measurable correlation: the ice cream tasted better to victorious fans. The study found that food tasted better to people when the team they supported was winning.

“When we looked at how they responded to these different flavors, in the games where they won, the flavors tasted sweeter and less sour, versus the opposite when they lost,” Dando said. The researchers’ best guess had to do the neurotransmitter serotonin: you have more of it in your system when you’re happy, which could influence taste, as there are serotonin receptors in our taste buds.

But according to Dando there could be another explanation for how much people liked the ice cream on the days when their team won.

"There is another, probably a more simplistic, interpretation," he said. "If you are in a really good mood, then it takes less to please you, and so something might taste a little bit better because your baseline is a little bit higher."

Either way, if you are triaging to limit your vices and only splurge for ice cream when it is as special occasion, wait until your team wins, because you might get more satisfaction from the indulgence.

Sports Fans, Charity, Giving, March Madness and The Pandemic

larryolmsted@gmail.com — Fri, 19 Mar 2021 15:46:40 GMT

Join the #MarchMadnessCharityChallenge !

One of the many interesting things I discovered while researching my book on sports fans is that fans are more charitable and prone to volunteerism in their communities than non-fans. This generosity of spirit runs the gamut from cash donations to giving blood, organ transplants, and time.

Most non-profits have really struggled during the pandemic, and in many cases were faced with a double whammy of more need and less donations. That’s why it occurred to me that as an esteemed 37 million Americans just filled out brackets for March Madness pools, in many cases kicking in ten, twenty or fifty dollars, it might be a good time to reflect on the need around us and match that with a bona fide charitable donation. Or maybe even give more.

I came up with the idea of basketball fans giving $64, just one dollar for each team in the NCAA Championship, to the cause of their choice – which can even include your alma mater given the nature of the NCAA. I chose the Make-A-Wish Foundation, because the stories I leaned about the positive health outcomes their gifts have on suffering children - especially sports related wishes – caught my eye and my heart while writing my book.

So, I came up with the idea of #marchmadnesscharitychallenge. Pick a cause, give $64 – or if you can’t afford that, five or ten bucks – and pass it on and pay it forward. Here’s a lot more info on sports fans and charity in this op-ed I just wrote for USA Today.

Why Sports Fandom is Different From – And Better Than – Other Kinds of Entertainment Fandom

larryolmsted@gmail.com — Fri, 05 Mar 2021 17:39:41 GMT

Do fans benefit more from sports than other forms of fandom? Yes!

Hundreds of studies around the world have proven that sports fans are happier than non-fans. Much of the mental health benefit of sports fandom in turn comes from a sense of belonging to a community of other fans. Because humans are tribal by nature, it is literally in our DNA to want to belong to a group. Sports fandom satisfies that in ways other a social organizations cannot.

But if being part of a fan community gives you a sense of belonging and makes you happy, wouldn’t you get the same benedict from other kinds of entrainment fandom, like since fiction or music or reading?

The answer is no.

Why? Because sports fans have several unique factors that differentiate them from fans of other forms of entertainment. The biggest is the ubiquity of team logos, or fan “uniforms.” When you are in the supermarket wearing, for example your Chicago Bulls hat, and you pass someone in a Bulls hoodie, you share eye contact and a brief acknowledgement. One NHL executive told me that in the industry this is known as “the head nod.” You and this total stranger are connected through your collective sports fandom. The same would happen if you were both wearing Harry Potter shirts, but frankly, that intersection happens far less, as sports teams logo wear is ubiquitous in our society.

Also, when you watch any live sporting event (at least outside of pandemic times) you are visually subjected to non-stop views of the audience. You might think you are watching football, but in reality you are watching football and people watching football. A crowd of twenty, thirty, forty or fifty thousand people, many wearing team logos, in your sight the entire game, has a strong subconscious effect. This is why sports fans interviewed by psychologists describe feeling transported to the stadium and being part of the crowd even when watching alone on their couch. You don’t see – or hear - the audience on the screen in any other kind of popular entertainment.

If you actually go to the stadium, this sense of belong to a group is amplified. But if you go see a Sci-Fi movie at the theater, even full of fellow fans, there is no sense of camaraderie because at the movie theater you cannot shout, chant, stand up for high-fives and discuss and dissect the action as it occurs or you would get kicked out. You are simply watching a movie alone in a crowd. The only way a movie fan can get the same effect is by attending a fan convention, and that is far less frequent a life occurrence than sporting events.

Finally, consider the humble bumper sticker. Sports fans love auto stickers, and my neighbor’s pick-up is adorned with both Red Sox and Patriots logos. You see sports stickers on cars all the time. But I have never, ever once seen a Harry Potter sticker. Or stickers for books. Or a sticker of any band other Phish or the Grateful Dead, whose fans have more in common with sports fans than they know.

Every major city in the country has full-time sports talk radio stations, but none that I know of have fantasy fiction talk radio stations. There are thousands of sports bars around the world, but I have never seen a movie bar.

The reality is that when you are part of a group of sports fans supporting a particular team, you are constantly sub-consciously reminded of your belonging by psychological inputs all around you, whether your are spectating at the moment or not, and these combine to give sports fans a much different and stronger sense of community than other fans. That in turn is why team fans have earned the nickname “__________ Nation,” like Packers Nation or Yankees Nation, while that term, referring to a country of its own, is not applied to Star Wars or Ariana Grande fans.

Author Larry Olmsted on the massive benefits of sports fandom

Fri, 26 Feb 2021 19:59:54 GMT

Boston Globe Column: Story Behind The Book

Enjoy my conversation with Boston Globe columnist (and Kansas Jayhawks fan) Kate Tuttle about the story behind the creation of my book, Fans.

"Larry Olmsted grew up going to Shea Stadium, but it was at Fenway Park that he first got the idea for his new book. Seeing a couple of young children walk by wearing offensive anti-Yankees T-shirts, Olmsted wondered about the effect of sports fandom on the human psyche. He assumed he knew the answer.

“I actually started to do research into fandom with the presumption that it was a negative thing,” Olmsted said. “But I quickly came to the conclusion that wasn’t the case at all.”

Read the rest of the article here.

COVID-19, Sports Fandom, And A Return To Normalcy

Mon, 22 Feb 2021 20:21:00 GMT

“I can’t wait till things get back to normal,” is a refrain you hear a lot these days, and understandably so. We all yearn for what life was like before the spread of COVID, whether that means travel, eating in restaurants, going to work or simply hanging out with friends. For sports fans it means a lot of things, and the return of sports to “normal” has been a low but steady progression of baby steps. First, when the virus erupted last March, there was the near-total cancellation of all sports around the world. Definitely not normal.

Then sports started coming back, from German soccer to NASCAR, followed by the four big leagues. The NBA and NHL played in fan-less bubbles, MLB played a shortened and rearranged season in fan-less non-bubbles. Not normal but better. The NFL played in a lot of completely empty or mostly empty stadiums while the league shuffled games around to odd time slots like Wednesday mid- afternoon, but the fan noise was refreshingly back in many cases. Closer, but not normal.

For pretty much all big-time sports, the vast majority of fans watch on TV, and in some cases, the lack of spectators in the stands didn’t affect the viewing experience as much - baseball stadiums full of fan cutouts were quirky but largely effective. Other times, the absence of in-person spectators fell flat, including anything resembling a hyped up “Bucket List” event: The Masters, The Kentucky Derby, the Indy 500.

All four leagues, despite many skeptics and seemingly long odds, completed their versions of the 2020 seasons in relatively successful fashion. By the time the Super Bowl rolled around to close this all out in early February, there were nearly 25,000 fans and some other touches that made the game seem much more “normal” - like a mixed-review halftime show and less than thrilling blow out game.

But the biggest factor in presenting America’s biggest annual television event of any type as business as usual was having fans in the seats, in person. This made things look normal, even if more than 60% of the seats were still empty (it didn’t look quite that obvious on TV). Wisely, a third of the fans in attendance were already vaccinated healthcare workers.

Personally, I still would not go a game, even with a mask, and real normalcy won’t return to sports until we can comfortably sit or stand next to strangers and exchange the occasional high-five again without worrying about social distancing or the human interaction killing us. But even a pittance of masked and vaccinated fans make the games seem much more normal than the early efforts in totally empty venues. One of the best examples was the NBA matchup a couple of weeks ago in Dallas, where the Mavericks hosted the Minnesota Timberwolves. It was the 25 ^th game of the nascent season, but the first at the city’s American Airlines Center with any fans at all, a rather paltry 1,500 of them, all vaccinated healthcare workers.

But in many ways, it was enough.

The Center holds around 20,000 and unlike the Super Bowl, the empty seats visually outweighed the occupied ones by a large margin, leaving substantial voids. But it was way better than nothing, and if there is one thing we have learned from all the limited capacity games in the past year, it is that it does not take nearly as many fans as we thought out make noticeable crowd noise. This in turn is a remainder of one very important thing that often gets overlooked in the face of celebrity athletes with huge media platforms and sometimes unbelievable paychecks - that there are no professional sports, period, without fans.

As Dallas Morning News sportswriter Brad Townsend reported, Mavericks coach Rick Carlisle said of the smallish crowd, “It helps bring back a little bit of normalcy. Which is greatly welcome.” Amen.

Read Townsend’s story here

NY Daily News: The Lessons We Can Learn From Sports Fandom: There’s A Reason Why Loyalty Is Especially Fierce In One Realm

Tue, 09 Feb 2021 19:50:01 GMT

Op-Ed: Fans author Larry Olmsted on the Lessons Fans Learn From Sports

The resurgent Buffalo Bills came up two touchdowns short of a trip to Tampa and shot at the Vince Lombardi Trophy. I was glued to the set for the AFC Championship, rooting my Bills on, but part of me knew it was probably just as well. The Bills lost their last four trips to the Big Game — back to back to back to back — the kind of record no one wants, and one that will in all likelihood never be broken.

But if there is one thing I have learned while researching the nature of sports fandom, it is to never say never, because what we enjoy so much about athletic contests is the inherent unpredictability. After all, just a few short months ago it was unclear whether there would even be a Super Bowl LV. Now we’ve got an epic quarterback matchup for the ages, 22,000 fans in the stands, and the first-ever championship game with actual home-field advantage. Other than the underwhelming halftime show, there is a lot to look forward to this weekend.

All in all, it was a good year to be a Buffalo supporter, but back in October, when I tried to tune into the Week 6 Bills-Titans game, I was disappointed to find that it had been postponed. That quickly become more common, as Monday Night Football morphed into Monday Afternoon and Evening Football, while the Steelers and Ravens entered uncharted territory with a midafternoon Wednesday game. But for bored and often sequestered fans with no movie theaters or live entertainment, rescheduled football was way better than no football.

In Aesop’s fable, “The Oak and the Reed,” the big, tough tree discovers too late that in a storm it is better to bend than break. The last year has been a torrential storm for sports, but at least the notoriously inflexible NFL finally learned some new tricks. After what seemed to be a fairly successful attempt at simulating a normal-ish season quickly devolved, radical ideas were floated, including shortened playoffs, playoffs bubbles, no playoffs, a postponed, relocated and/or fan-less Super Bowl, or even cancellation of America’s marquee spectator sports event.

Such drastic changes proved unnecessary, but the ups, downs and league’s flexibility are a teachable moment for fans as well. That has been the untold story of sports in the pandemic.

Sports are inherently unpredictable. Yet leagues and athletes have long been fixated on making them less so. That’s why, for example, we have instant replay. Complex data-driven fielding shifts a la “Moneyball” are all about eliminating unpredictability. So is training for many sports; pro golfers hit balls endlessly to ingrain muscle memory that will not fail in the face of mounting pressure (doesn’t always work). And fans? Well, in sports everyone loves an underdog. This makes for good movies, both fictional (“Rocky,” “Breaking Away,” “The Bad News Bears”) and based on reality (“Hoosiers,” “Rudy,” “Cool Runnings,” “Miracle”). Fans who embrace underdog themes, such as validation of hard work, inspirational coaching, teamwork ethic, or even good versus evil miss the real point. The true power of sports is its unpredictability, and nowhere is that clearer than in shocking upsets. If we really thought USA hockey had absolutely no chance against the USSR in the 1980 Olympics, no one would have watched. There would be no sports.

Research shows so many physical, emotional and societal benefits to being a sports fan, but as I racked up study after study about all the good things that happen to us from following teams, my editor asked me, “Isn’t it the same for fans of Harry Potter? Or Star Wars? Or opera?” She questioned whether fandom was fandom in any sphere. So I went back to the experts, psychologists and academics.

It turns out that one big factor setting sports apart is its inherent uncertainty. It may have taken four decades and a few too many installments, but we always knew the Dark Side was not going to take the galaxy. James Bond won’t let the villain blow up the world.

Sports are the last great unknown. It’s why games are, unlike most any other form of broadcast or digitally delivered entertainment, still consumed in real-time. Accidentally hearing the final score ruins the unscripted experience. No one waits 17 weeks to binge-watch the previous NFL season.

The era of “peak TV,” with limitless content via more and better streaming options than ever, seemed perfect for the pandemic. Yet opening day ratings for the return of baseball were through the roof — fans were starving for games. The MLB season opener drew a record 4.4 million viewers, up from just 1.2 million the year before. WNBA viewership jumped a staggering 68% across the entire season. These record ratings slipped as more and more sports came back to the screen, but fans hardly turned away: the first 10 NFL Playoff games averaged within one percent of last year’s viewership.

Following sports has been demonstrated to make us happier, feel more socially connected, be part of a community and provide a very real healing balm in times of cultural trauma. For many reasons, we need sports, and especially now. But we also need to be safe. Both the spread of COVID-19 and return of sports have been full of surprises, and the bend-or-break silver lining is that it forces us to embrace change to survive.

So, what can sports fans learn?

The NBA and NHL got creative with “bubbles,” a word no one but children ever used conversationally pre-COVID. Now we hear it daily, and just as those seasons finished successfully, we learned that in our own lives, maintaining a bubble is a good practice. Baseball? For my entire lifetime, it was safe to gather in stands without social distancing, but when a virus changed that status quo, MLB abruptly bent in the wind with an entire regular season of empty ballparks. As fans flocked back to televised games in record numbers, the sea of empty seats provided a months-long visual reminder that our safety lay in social separation. Baseball also changed matchups, dividing teams into geographic clusters to keep games regional and reduce travel. No sporting event involves as much travel as the Olympics, which were wisely postponed in hopes that vaccine salvation would arrive within a year. These demonstrations of minimizing unnecessary travel and that even the biggest gatherings on the calendar were worth skipping to save lives applied equally to Thanksgiving, Hannukah, Christmas and New Year’s. Not everyone got this message, but millions did. The NHL fined players for unsafe social gatherings. The NFL made a very public point of aggressively fining teams and coaches caught violating mask requirements on TV.

So even in a global pandemic, we can still learn a lot from the unpredictability of sports. If the Bills play one mid-season a few days late, the Boston Marathon is canceled and the Olympics are postponed, let’s think of it as just a part of sports. In fact, let’s recognize it as an essential part of what make sports so uniquely important in every culture on earth. And if the fans watching in droves learn that safety measures, like frequent testing, wearing masks, practicing social distancing, and skipping unnecessary travel and ill-advised gatherings can make their own lives and others safer, then that’s just one more blessing we get from sports.

Larry Olmsted is the author of the forthcoming book “ Fans ,” about new research on sports fans, and has taught as a visiting professor at Dartmouth College.

Big Winners at Tokyo Summer Olympics

Tue, 26 Jan 2021 21:14:05 GMT

Assuming the 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympic Games, now rescheduled for late July 2021, go as planned, there will be lots of Gold, Silver and Bronze medals handed out. But the biggest long-term winners will likely be the two newly added sports debuting for the first time, surfing and “rock” climbing.

In my book Fans: How Watching Sports Makes Us Happier, Healthier And More Understanding I cover a lot of the benefits that being a sports fan brings us individually and collectively as society. One of those benefits to society is physical health and exercise, and one way that happens is when spectators are so intrigued by the sport they are watching that it motivates them to either generally “get fit” or try a sport new to them as participants. In the book I cite studies specifically related to the Olympics, summer and winter, and how every two years the games cause a spike in gym membership and fitness activities.

But this is demonstrated most clearly when the Olympics televises sports that are not regularly seen by viewers at home, and in the past such spikes attributed to the Olympics have occurred in swimming, beach volleyball and triathlon.

Surfing and rock climbing both stand to attract a lot of newbies when they air from Japan for a couple of reasons, First, they are both “sexy” and exciting sports that will hook viewers and get the adrenaline flowing. Most sports fans at home have never watched either sport, and will be fascinated when they do. But they are also accessible. You can take a 2-4 hour “learn to surf” lesson at just about any beach resort around the world and you don’t have to be especially fit or experienced. I’ve personally done these intro classes a couple of times, and it’s lot of fun. I could really feel the rush when I rode my first wave into the beach with a big smile plastered all over my face. I have long been an avid skier, but there’s no way I could do a run just a few minutes after starting my first lesson, but that’s possible with surfing.

Climbing is even more accessible because the format being used in the Olympics is indoor on an artificial wall, and these can be found in climbing gyms and health clubs all over the country, including the middle of major cities where other sports are hard to practice. It’s safe and easy to try for the first time.

So, if the Games go on, expect a surge of interest in surfing and climbing – and maybe you’ll try it yourself!

LA Times: Sports Can Heal the U.S. After Coronavirus Pandemic Ends

Tue, 28 Apr 2020 13:26:09 GMT

Op-Ed: When sports return, they will once again play the role of national healer

Only four major sporting events — if you count the Westminster Kennel Club dog show as sport — have never been interrupted by civil strife, including the Great Depression, the 1918 flu pandemic and both world wars. Both the dog show and the Rose Bowl have already been staged this year. That leaves the 2020 Kentucky Derby and the Boston Marathon, both rescheduled for September.

In their long histories, the derby and the marathon have had date changes, so their uninterrupted records won’t require asterisks if they take place as planned. They will survive the coronavirus pandemic and go on as before, perhaps with even more celebration and resilience.

And with the help of spectator sports, so will we.

Sports as “social entities” have a role in helping communities and their residents bounce back from severe disaster, according to researchers who studied the effect of spectator sport on victims of natural and man-made disasters between 2001 and 2011. The time span covers thousands of catastrophes, including 9/11 and the 2011 earthquake that triggered deadly tsunamis in Japan.

The two psychology professors showed that sports provide social support in post-disaster situations in distinct ways, many of them tangible — such as motivating fans to increase donations and volunteerism — and some emotional, including alleviating stress and providing a sense of hope.

Recently, pundits have suggested that our love of sports cannot survive a few months, or potentially the rest of the year, without them. Headlines asking “Does Coronavirus Mean the End of Sports as We Know Them?” and “Our Sports Changed Forever” suggest that even a temporary pause may make fans lose their passion or weaken our bond with sports.

Over the last few years, I’ve studied what makes sports fans tick and what our love of sports means to us as a society. So this doom and gloom surrounding spectator sports puzzles me, because history shows sports have a medicinal power. They do cure what ails us.

Last year, 89 of the 100 most-watched TV programs focused on sports. Additionally, nearly 60 million Americans participate in fantasy sports, which cannot exist without real-life games. The most common motive fantasy players give for participating is “a sense of community and belonging.”

Fans grieving the absence of sports, those who desperately missed March Madness or yearn for baseball’s opening day, are starving for games to return. When they do, sports will once again play the role of national healer.

I’m not going out on a limb here, because sports has the track record to prove their link between trying times and healing.

Survivors of the 2017 Las Vegas concert turned massacre — the worst mass shooting in American history — told me again and again that sports helped mend and bring the city together. Specifically, the Cinderella debut season of the NHL’s Las Vegas Golden Knights, which played its first game just nine days after and a few blocks from the site of the attack. Every game was a sellout.

Jessica Duran, who survived the shooting, was afraid to leave her home for weeks, let alone dive back into crowds in the heart of the Strip. As the buzz around the Knights grew, she finally attended her first professional hockey game. She would go back 50 more times that season. Becoming a fan helped her confront her fear and “take control” of her life, she said.

Casino dealers, Uber drivers, bartenders, among many others, said they strongly believed that sports medicine arrived exactly when it was needed most.

“You can’t mention one without the other,” said Carolyn Goodman, mayor of Las Vegas. “We had just been brought to our knees by this horrible, diabolical tragedy. … For the Golden Knights to have that season and start the healing process, the timing was incredible. It took us from a really dark place and gave us hope.”

New York City’s 9/11 Museum staged an exhibit last year that centered on the vital role spectator sports played in reuniting a terrified nation. Called “The Comeback Season: Sport After 9/11,” it also documented the similar role sports has played after many other tragedies. Exhibit curator Hicks Wogan, originally from New Orleans, said, “I still remember how sports helped after Hurricane Katrina. … We saw it after the Boston Marathon bombing and the terrorist attacks in Paris. This is a recurring story that plays out over and over throughout history and around the world.”

The last time all major sports went dark was after 9/11, and their comeback to the national stage was marked by a Mets-Braves contest in New York that ended in storybook fashion with a come-from-behind winning home run by Mets catcher Mike Piazza. Most baseball fans I know recall the emotions it evoked. “That game was the moment when we went from being citizens full of rage and sorrow and anger to being fans again, it was OK to clap again, and to laugh and smile,” said Taylor Shields, a sports-crazed fan in Colorado.

Carol Gies and her three sons attended that game. Her husband, New York City Fire Department Lt. Ronnie E. Gies, was killed in 9/11. The family had always been huge Mets fans and felt like “it was the place we had to be,” Gies later said. “When that ball went over the wall, I saw my children smile for the first time since they lost their dad. 9/11 went away for that one split-second. I was like, ‘You know what, we’re going to get through it.’ ”

America’s stadiums are often described as temples of their respective sports, but the reality is they are bigger than houses of worship and are often the largest places people can come together. When the games resume, stadiums will once again be full of fans celebrating normalcy, the simple fact that they can sit next to strangers instead of staying six feet away — and cheer as one.

Larry Olmsted is the author of the forthcoming book “ Fans ,” about new research on sports fans, and has taught as a visiting professor at Dartmouth College.