Aaron Rodgers, Ronda Rousey, Michael Phelps, and Shaquille O’Neal are all legendary athletes that climbed to the top of their respective sports. Yet, these four superstars are all strangely intertwined through another set of outings you might no have known about. You can also throw Lindsey Vonn and Rob Gronkowski into this list. All of them, from Gronk to Shaq, have been a feature on one of the biggest nature events on television: Shark Week!
A Huge Event for Discovery
Shark Week has become an all-but-guaranteed hit for the Discovery Channel. It’s become a global event drawing in millions of viewers, earning it a fandom that has led to many spin-offs and wider attempts at monetising the seasonal shark craze. There are countless designers putting out unofficial Shark Week shirts, but there are also official games. The online Slingo Shark Week game, for instance, allows you to play slingo games for real money in shark-infested waters. This game melds slots and bingo, featuring bonuses that go all-in on the shark theme: there’s the Shark Wheel, Break the Cage, What Did the Shark Eat, and Fish Grab, and all while hammerhead sharks can roll in as wilds, and great white jaws can trigger Super Wilds.
The broad appeal of Shark Week is therefore easy to see – so much so that commodities like the above are actually available year-round – but when the official event does land, Discovery are always keen to make a splash. In 2023, record viewership was recorded on the event’s 35th anniversary. A vital factor in this was likely that Discovery, through its corporate ties to Warner Bros., was able to leverage the popular appeal of actor Jason Momoa by making him that year’s host. Then, in 2024, the John Cena-hosted Shark Week catapulted Discovery to rank as the number one primetime cable network. But these examples are far from the event’s first rodeo with star power.
Sharks vs Athletes
Shark Week went through a phase of testing the greatest of human athletes against the power of sharks in the domain of the predatory fish. Easily the biggest of these showcases came in 2017 with Discovery’s “Man vs Shark” show, in which Michael Phelps would race a great white shark. Phelps was the ideal choice, having collected a record haul of gold medals in swimming.
To prepare for the occasion, Phelps was pit against a reef shark and a hammerhead shark. His 18.7-second time actually beat the reef shark, but fell short of the 15.1 posted by the hammerhead. Over 100m in the same stretch of water off of the coast of South Africa, Phelps clocked in at 38.1 seconds to the great white’s 36.1 seconds.
After the rampant success of this battle between man and shark, Discovery doubled down on exploiting athletic prestige. In 2018, Shark Week featured Aaron Rodgers, Rob Gronkowski, and Lindsey Vonn in “Monster Tag”, Ronda Rousey dove with sharks in “Uncaged”, and Shaquille O’Neal was the star of the show in “Shaq Does Shark Week”.
Shark Week returns on 6 July, running until 13 July 2025. Once again, it’s set to be one of the major TV events of the summer. Hopefully, it will once again feature some all-star athletes in bizarre challenges with these denizens of the deep!