Forever and never are two words that are dangerous to use. That said, it seems no one wants to own collectibles about the Olympics in 2022. The 2022 Winter Olympics in China may have been given the worst ratings and reception of any Olympics ever. This should be of little to no surprise considering that there was a diplomatic boycott and considering that even those who would have wanted to attend could not or decided to stay away entirely.

Collectors Dashboard tried to track the trends impacting the Olympics viewership. Maybe it’s that the games were half-way around the world. Maybe it’s the Russia-China tension. And then again, maybe it’s just that the stands were almost entirely vacant and watching the Olympics felt like watching televised practice. There was just no energy to the Olympics. Statistics were used from Sports Illustrated.

Corporate sponsors may have felt the heat too. This year’s ratings of the 2022 Beijing Olympics appears to have been the smallest audience measurement of all-time for NBCUniversal. A Sports Illustrated report indicated that the audience averaged 11.4 million viewers across all platforms. And sadly, that was during the primetime.

Perhaps the only good news is that the audience was reported to be the second largest streaming audience ever. Then again, how long has streaming been the norm? All in all, the drop was shown to be a 42% audience drop from the 2018 Winter Olympics and down 26% from the Tokyo Olympics which had been delayed due to COVID.

As for streaming, the NBC Sports app’ average primetime audience was shown to be 516,000 and total U.S. viewership was represented as 4.3 billion minutes over the 18 days on all of the available platforms. Big numbers, but not relatively.

The long and short of the matter is that collectors are probably not wanting to load up on cards, merchandise and other commemorative items. If no one cared when the games were taking place, who will care about the passion for the collectibles.

It doesn’t seem fair to say that no one will to ever own collectibles about the Olympics in the future. It does seem fair to say that if you are offered collectibles for the 2022 Beijing Olympics that you might want to save your money and spend it on something else. Or to buy stocks and bonds…