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Sports Drinking Game
Fouls, flags and replays - rules for every broadcast.
Sports Drinking Game
The Olympics Drinking Game
The **Olympics drinking game** is a sports drinking game where the sport changes every ten minutes. Summer or...
You watchThe Olympics
You needDrinks + friends
Triggers14 drink rules
Best with2-15 players
The Olympics drinking game is a sports drinking game where the sport changes every ten minutes. Summer or Winter, the Games run just over two weeks, and a prime-time broadcast hops from a swimming final to a gymnastics rotation to a diving heat, with a medal ceremony, an anthem and a backstory package stitched between them. The triggers are built on those broadcast beats, not on any one sport, so the room stays in it whether the screen shows the 100m final or the second round of team handball.
Olympic coverage has a very particular rhythm: the sport itself is short (a swim final is under a minute, a sprint under ten seconds), and the packaging around it is long. That makes it a different kind of sports drinking game from a football match - the podium, the flag draped over the shoulders, the coach in tears in the stands and the commentator saying 'going for gold' fire far more often than a world record, and the actual races are the breather between them.
How to set it up
- Adopt a nation for the Games and follow its medal table - the commentators update it every night, and a country to root for turns a random archery quarterfinal into a stake.
- Check the schedule for the marquee final in tonight's session (the 100m, the all-around, the men's or women's downhill) and plan to be sharpest for it, because the broadcast builds the whole evening toward that one event.
- Decide whether the opening or closing ceremony counts: the parade of nations alone runs a couple of hours with a flag-bearer for every country, so it needs its own short list rather than the event rules.
- Have the commentary up and the medal table open on a phone - the record and standings mentions are the triggers a loud room misses, and the table settles the arguments.
The rules: drink when…
The heart of the game: 14 triggers. Read them out before you press play, keep the ones your group likes, cut any that would fire every minute, and remember that a "drink" is one sip.
| When this happens… | …you drink |
|---|---|
| An athlete wins gold | Sip twice |
| A medal ceremony takes place on the podium | Sip |
| A national anthem plays for a gold medalist | Sip |
| The commentators mention a world or Olympic record | Sip |
| The broadcast plays a personal backstory package | Sip |
| A slow-motion replay is shown | Sip |
| The camera shows a coach or family reacting in the stands | Sip |
| The commentators mention the medal table or standings | Sip |
| An athlete cries on camera | Sip |
| A race or event ends in a photo finish | Sip twice |
| An athlete is shown with a flag draped around them | Sip |
| The broadcast cuts to a shot of the host city | Sip |
| A commentator says 'going for gold' or 'the podium' | Sip |
| A world record is broken | Drink for 3 seconds |
How to play
Pick your session
The Games run for over two weeks, so you are not playing all of it. A first-week Summer session (swimming finals, gymnastics) is dense with medals and anthems; an athletics night in week two has fewer finals but the world-record rule is live. For Winter, a figure-skating final night is the emotional-cutaway jackpot.
Sip on the packaging, not the sport
Most of an Olympic broadcast is not competition: it is backstory packages, podium ceremonies, replays and reaction shots. Those are the triggers that fire. The race or routine itself is usually short, and the 'going for gold' and 'the podium' commentary lines are the high-frequency rule that keeps sips coming between events.
Treat medals by weight
A gold is 'sip twice', but the ceremony that follows is the real sequence: podium, flag, anthem, the medallist crying - four sips inside two minutes. A world record is the three-second drink because it is rare; a photo finish is 'sip twice' because it is the tensest moment the Games produce.
Pace by the schedule
A prime-time session runs three to four hours and is edited to peak late with the marquee final. Use the filler segments - host-city travelogues, studio analysis - to eat and hydrate, and drop the ceremony sips for the last hour so the big final still gets a full room.
Variations & house rules
Nation loyalties
Each person or side adopts a country. Your side drinks whenever a rival nation wins gold, and hands out a sip whenever your nation reaches the podium. At the end of the night, whoever's nation sits highest on the medal table hands out a drink to the room.
Draft a team
Before the session, everyone drafts a few athletes or events from tonight's schedule. You drink when one of your picks is on screen and hand out sips when one of your picks medals - a fantasy league for the podium, with the marquee-final athlete going first overall.
Medal-table squares
Make a grid of nations and medal counts. Whoever holds the square that matches where a country lands on the table at the end of the night hands out three sips instead of collecting a prize; the host nation's square doubles because the broadcast will not stop mentioning it.
Pro tips
The anthem and podium rules stack: a gold medal, then the ceremony, then the anthem, then the athlete crying, then the flag - so a single final can be five sips in three minutes, which is why the event itself only gets one.
US prime-time coverage is usually tape-delayed and edited, so it is the emotional beats back to back; a live morning feed from the host city has more dead air, more heats and far fewer backstory packages.
Team sports finals (basketball, hockey, water polo) run long and produce few Olympic-specific triggers until the ceremony, so switch to a plain sports list for those and bring the full list back for the podium.
Drink responsibly: A first-week Summer session can stack a dozen medal ceremonies in one night, each with an anthem, a flag and a crying medallist, so the ceremony rules add up faster than the sport ones and the Games last two weeks, not one night. A movie-length game adds up fast, so keep the pours small, water between drinks, and swap any trigger for a sip of water whenever you like. See our safety guide.
Frequently asked questions
Which Olympic events are best for a drinking game?
Swimming finals and gymnastics in the first week of a Summer Games, and athletics finals in the second - they are short, they come one after another, and each ends with a podium, an anthem and a tearful cutaway. For Winter, figure skating and short-track speed skating produce the most replays, tears and photo finishes. Marathon and road cycling are slow, so play a plain sports list for those.
How long is an Olympics drinking game session?
One prime-time broadcast is three to four hours and builds toward a marquee final near the end. The Games themselves run just over two weeks, so nobody plays every night - pick two or three sessions, ideally one from week one and one from week two, and the opening ceremony if you want a night for the parade of nations.
Does the opening ceremony count?
It gets its own list, not the event rules. The parade of nations means a flag-bearer, a costume and a commentator fact for every country, so sip on your adopted nation's entrance, on any outfit the room agrees is wild, and twice when the cauldron is lit. Running the medal rules would leave you with nothing to drink to for two hours.
How do you handle the medal ceremony?
It is a sequence, not one trigger: sip on the podium, sip on the anthem, sip if the gold medallist cries, sip if they drape the flag. That is four sips in a couple of minutes, so most rooms keep the gold medal itself at 'sip twice' and let the ceremony do the rest rather than adding more.
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