Welcome everyone to Fantasy Olympian 2016! The site has been updated and we are now ready to accept new teams and leagues for the Rio 2016 Games, which start August 5, 2016 -- if everyone inolved in the Games can get their acts together!
If you are new to Fantasy Olympian, we are glad you found us -- this year we are celebrating our 10th anniversary! We've been doing this since 2006 and we have gotten bigger every Olympic cycle. If you are returning, welcome back! It's always great to see the same folks returning every couple years. We're once again thrilled to have computer programmers Steve Hammond and Nat Budin in our corner making the site much more user friendly!
For the new and old alike, here's a look at how the game will work this year:
1. Registering with the site
If you have not dones so before, start by registering with FantasyOlympian.com. Past users can use their logins from 2014. As we have spelled out in greater detail in our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy, we will not use your information for any purpose other than to administer the games. To register, simply input your information on the registration page and then click on the confirmation link in the e-mail that will be sent to your account.
2. Drafting
Either host your own offline draft and have your league commissioner manually enter the draft results, or have each player pre-rank his or her draft picks and the draft can be completed automatically. Note that for any athletes that are not pre-ranked, they will be drafted in order of our athlete list. The drafts must be completed before the Opening Ceremonies on August 5. We hope to have the athlete list posted by July 25, but you can conduct offline drafts before then if you wish.
3. Player list
As usual, the player list is a work-in-progress. Qualification events are ongoing, so it's hard for us to make final medal predictions. For this reason, we recommend that you not conduct your drafts until the Olympics fields are set. The athlete list this year is not ranked from best pick to worst pick, but you can see how many points each athlete/team is expected to receive and draft accordingly (or pre-rank your picks accordingly). We've already put some athletes on the list, and we will continue to do so leading up to the Games. We will do our best to make sure every athlete you might want to draft is on the list, but if there is someone that is missing, just shoot us an e-mail and we will make the necessary addition.
4. International athletes
The only downside of the Summer Olympics is that it is simply too large for us to evaluate all athletes. So for the summer Games, we only allow you to draft American athletes (plus tiebreaker countries). Go ahead and cross Usain Bolt off your list -- the international athletes will be fun to watch, but you won't get any points here for trying to draft them! Otherwise, all the rules are the same as they have always been, so if you are new, cruise on over to our Rules page and figure out how it's done.
Finally, my usual disclaimer -- we have been hosting this fantasy game for a decade now. It started with four friends and has grown to more than a thousand participants. We are happy that it has been bigger each year and we think it is getting better every year. Our goal is to provide an enjoyable and professional experience. But please remember that we have never made a dime off of Fantasy Olympian -- this is a hobby/passion/public service for us. So while we will do our best to keep Fantasy Olympian running at a high level, please know that life (jobs, family, etc.) sometimes gets away. We're glad you have chosen to play our game, and we appreciate your patience.