Put the Dunk Contest in the Olympics

A genuinely serious proposal for the people in charge of the Olympics—because a lot of Olympic events are actually a lot like the dunk contest! (Except for the Kia product placement.)

Mac McClung won his third straight dunk contest on Saturday night. My favorite part of McClung’s dunking is how he finds creative ways to demonstrate how much hangtime he’s getting. To prove you’re athletic enough to tap a basketball to the rim in mid-air before dunking it, you first have to be clever enough to come up with the idea:

Tired of simply defeating his contemporaries, McClung made a solid Greatest Dunker Of All Time case by mimicking several legendary dunks of the past and improving on them. His dunk over a Kia makes the footage of Blake Griffin’s dunk look like black-and-white clips of Bob Cousy baffling defenders with the never-before-seen “turning left” move. How did we think that was cool at the time?

But McClung seems conflicted about his dunk dominance. Every year, he expresses hesitancy about returning to win his contest. He’s already said he doesn’t want to come back for a fourth championship in 2026. Dunkexander wept, for there were no more rims left to conquer¹.

McClung clearly feels immense pressure to be bigger than dunks. He wants to become an NBA rotation player, but he’s been unable to crack into the NBA, despite being winning all these dunk contests, despite winning the G-League championship, despite winning G-League MVP last year. The dunk contest remains a sideshow, the least serious part of the tremendously unserious All-Star weekend, and McClung isn’t sure whether he wants to be its king anymore.

I can’t help but feel we aren’t providing a big enough stage for McClung’s breathtaking athleticism and creativity. So I have a proposal to give dunk kings like McClung the prestige they deserve.

Put the dunk contest in the Olympics.

This is not a bit. This is an 80, perhaps 90 percent serious proposal to the IOC and FIBA, from an Olympics journalist and dunk contest enthusiast. I earnestly think that adding a dunk event to the Olympics would be a great move for both the Olympics and the world of basketball.

Dunking is Sports Art, like so many great Olympic events.

Because the dunk contest developed alongside the more legitimate game of basketball, we’ve been taught to see it as frivolous. Beauty is secondary to utility in the American Sports Brain.

But think for a second about what the dunk contest really is. It’s a judged event that rewards a combination of athleticism, artistry, technique, and inventiveness. There are dozens of Olympic events fitting that exact description, from classic mainstays like diving, figure skating, and gymnastics, to newfangled events like snowboarding, skateboarding, and breaking². Simone Biles and Mac McClung both work in the field of aesthetic athleticism.

There are even a handful of “best trick”-type events which are near-identical in concept and format to the dunk contest, like the vault in gymnastics. (I say near-identical because to date, no Olympic gymnast has vaulted over a Kia.) How, exactly, are the Big Air events in snowboarding and freestyle skiing different from the dunk contest?

The dunk contest could use some formalization.

The dunks themselves are good, but the dunk contest has near-perennial issues with the details. The format changes basically every year—they’ve never quite figured out how to penalize missed dunks, or whether to penalize them at all. The scoring is imprecise, and has essentially turned into “all good dunks get a 50.” The dunkers are not necessarily chosen for dunking prowess—sometimes, they’re just buzzy names. And the judges have no dunk contest judging expertise, and often make questionable decisions.³

If dunking were in the Olympics, it would have standardized rules, a legitimate qualification system, a consistent dunk scoring system, and accredited dunk judges. This would solve all the problems I mentioned, because judged events run by international sporting bodies are famously reputable and controversy free.

This would be an easy win for the Olympics…

The Olympics would love to add another basketball medal event to their program. In fact, they already did this in 2020 by adding 3x3 basketball to the Olympics.

3x3 checked a lot of boxes the IOC likes to check when they add new events to the Olympics: It’s part of an existing and popular sport, it seems “hip” and “young,” or at least hipper and younger than equestrian and fencing, and it doesn’t require an expensive venue or a significant number of additional athletes. The same would also be true with dunking.

And you know how they hype up the crowd at 3x3 events? They do dunk contests. Here’s the contest from the 2023 World Cup in Vienna, won by Polish dunk superstar Piotr Grabowski.

But for some reason, these dunk contests remain an aftershow rather than their own event. It feels like FIBA holding an event called the “World Cup of Dunking” or the “Dunk World Championship” would be a layup (or, you know, a slam dunk) for the international governing body of basketball. It would certainly be easier than inventing and codifying an entirely new form of the sport, which they did with 3x3. I’m not sure why they haven’t connected the dots yet.

… And it would be an easy win for basketball.

An Olympic dunk contest would help grow the game globally. There would, of course, be international dunk qualifiers to get into the Olympic dunk contest, and I think we’d see a greater diversity of medalists and champions, because it’s easier to have a single Dunk Guy than to beat Team USA.

An Olympic dunk contest would presumably lead to a women’s dunk competition, which has never really been a thing. I’m here to get Ashlyn Watkins a gold medal!

And an Olympic dunk contest would get the game’s superstars back into dunking. The generation above me got to watch Michael Jordan in the dunk contest. LeBron never gave it a shot, because why would he? I think the opportunity to win an individual gold medal in an Olympic dunk contest would have changed that. At the very least, I think we’d see international players like Giannis Antetokounmpo try to win a gold for their nations since a 5-on-5 title is unlikely.

Most importantly, Mac McClung deserves it.

This post was initially going to be entitled LET MAC MCCLUNG PLAY IN THE NBA, YOU BASTARDS and feature like 2,000 words about how the league needs to give our dunking hero some minutes. (I will still write this post if enough people yell or ask nicely in the comments. The man is a damn superstar in the G-League.)

But what if McClung didn’t have to fret about finding a role in the league? What if we could appreciate his brilliance for what it is, instead of making him worry about what he’s not? What if McClung could truly dedicate himself to his art form, instead of throwing together a few dunks while trying to earn an NBA career? What if we’ve been keeping our greatest dunkers from truly soaring by dulling the shine of their achievements?

What if instead of “AT&T Slam Dunk Contest Champion Mac McClung,” he was “Olympic gold medalist Mac McClung?” That would feel more fitting of one of the most spectacular athletes I’ve ever watched, stuck in a sport that doesn’t quite know how to celebrate him.

1. At first I was tempted to stop using the “Alexander wept” anecdote/quote when I realized it was not actually a quote from antiquity, but something cooked up by the screenwriters on Die Hard. Then I decided I should use it like 3 times as often.

2. Also, the 3-point contest is just as legitimate as archery or shooting, but that’s a discussion for another day.

3. Remember when Dwyane Wade was the deciding factor in Aaron Gordon losing the dunk contest to Derrick Jones, Jr., who had been his teammate on the Miami Heat the year before? Probably the worst thing to happen in the first few months of 2020!