Today kicks off the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris, France, but there won’t be any NFL players who will be competing. This may initially sound obvious, especially considering football isn’t one of the Olympic sports. Despite this, professional football players have historically competed in different sports, including track and field, rugby, and even wrestling.
Players Who Have Competed in the Summer Olympics
Quite a few former players have competed and even succeeded in the Summer Olympics. Here are just a few:
Michael Bates: During the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona, Michael Bates, a five-time Pro Bowler for the Seahawks, Browns, and Seahawks, competed in the 200-meter Spring and won a Bronze medal.
Milt Campbell – Campbell was a running back for the Cleveland Browns in 1957 after competing in the Decathlon in 1952 and 1956. He was the gold medalist in the 1956 Summer Olympics in Melbourne, Australia.
Jim Thorpe – Often considered one of the founding members of the NFL, Jim Thorpe competed and won gold in multiple events, the pentathlon and decathlon, in the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm.
Herschel Walker – While he didn’t compete in summer games, Hershal Walker, who is considered one of the greatest players of all time in the NFL, competed in the Bobsled in 1992 for France.
Nate Ebner – Ebner is the most recent player to compete in the Olympics. The defensive back from the New England Patriots competed in the 2016 Summer Olympics for the U.S. Rugby team.
DK Metcalf Recently Trie to Make an Olympic Team
A recent example of this can be seen with DK Metcalf, who is often considered the fastest player, who competed back in 2021 in the 2021 USA Track and Field Golden Games in an attempt to qualify for the Olympic trials. While he held up his own, clocking in a 10.36 in the 100 meters, he finished 15th out of 17th, failing to qualify for the Olympic Trials.
For perspective, at the Olympic trials, he would have finished 27th with that same time. He would have had to have run a 9.86 to make it to the Olympics, or half a second faster. In NFL terms, that is like asking a quarterback to go from throwing 150 yards per game to 400 yards per game.
NFL Players in the Olympics May Officially Be a Thing of the Past
Historically, some of the best athletes in the United States have been professional football players. This makes sense when you look at all the positions. To be the best lineman, being one of the strongest people makes sense. To be a running back, it takes elite track speed.
For decades, football dominated with revenue, while sports like track and field were secondary sports that didn’t have the funding or following to produce as many elite athletes. This limited how much training a sprinter could really do since they often had to have another full-time job.
Today, that is no longer the case. Track athletes now have the resources and money backing them to focus their entire careers solely on running, throwing, or jumping. Because of that, it will become rare for a football player to be good enough, at least while still playing, to be good at football and good enough to compete at the Olympic level in another sport.
The exception to this feels like it would be in perhaps rugby or in the throwing events. Even though there are elite rugby players, in the U.S., rugby is still growing, opening up the possibility of an elite NFL player perhaps being able to make an Olympic team. As far as throwing, the form differences would be tough to overcome, but it is plausible to believe that a player could be strong enough to overcome the differences.
