The new sports will add 18 events and 474 athletes to the Tokyo Games, taking the totals to 33 and around 11,000.
It's a far cry from the philosophy that underpinned the Games in antiquity, and even the modern era, which began in Athens in 1896. But that was before money succeeded Faster - Higher - Stronger as the driving motivation. And it's difficult to agree with IOC president Thomas Bach that the expanded programme will add to the legacy of the Tokyo Games.
It will just make them more expensive to host, in an era when the spending of stupendous sums of money can no longer be justified.
It is sad that the Rio Games will be remembered, at least in part, for the fact that they needed the presence of thousands of armed troops to ensure they weren't disrupted by protesters, or worse, terrorists. That any country can spend of gargantuan sums of money to provide 16 days of possibly corrupt competition when millions of people who inhabit the host city/country live in abject poverty defies all standards of decency.
As for Rio, the only possible silver lining, that hosting the event would prompt significant improvements to Rio de Janeiro's natural environment, has been squandered.
The city might boast some of the world's most famous beaches, but they are also among the world's most polluted. Even if the obligation to provide a semi-clean environment for water sport competitors has been met to some degree, it's a fair bet that the status quo will be restored once the athletes have gone home.
None of this matters, of course, when there is money to be made. And a lot of people will be making plenty of it, with armed troops standing by to ensure that their investment is protected.
What the IOC should be doing is reducing the size of the Games, culling the sports that have no link with the celebration of physical ability that they are founded on, restore the restriction to amateurs and give them a permanent home in Athens.
Likewise the Commonwealth Games, with a permanent home in London. That would negate the need for host cities to spend money they don't have, and while it might disappoint the skateboarding, golf and wall climbing fraternities, it would do more to guarantee the Games' survival than making them bigger and more expensive.
The rot began to set in when the Games became professional, a move that did more than anything else to rob them of their credibility. Whatever they might say, it is difficult to believe that many athletes see them as the pinnacle of their careers when they swan in the day before their event, take their medal and move on to the next meet.
This is not about achieving a dream or even striving for national pride. For some the Olympics are just another day at the office.
It didn't used to be like that. There was a time when representing their country at an Olympic Games was the goal of a lifetime, a privilege and an honour, an achievement built, in many cases, upon years of dedicated preparation. There was no need to worry about credibility then.
There was no need to worry about cheats either. The use of drugs to gain an advantage is a relatively new phenomenon, but has now become an inexciseable cancer. United States swimmer Michael Phelps, the most successful Olympian of all time, said last week that he doubted he had ever been part of a "clean" competition.
Eventually greed contaminates everything we do. There was a time when communist Europe saw sporting success as proof of its superiority, and while those days might have gone (even if many of the records set in that era haven't) there is still a desire to win at all costs.
The IOC had the opportunity to knock that concept back in the weeks leading up to the Rio Games and let it go by. There is no reason now to believe that international sport will ever be genuinely clean again.
Mind you, the IOC is not alone in thinking that quantity beats quality, and that one cannot have too much of a good thing. Rugby is suffering the same delusion.
New Zealand's dominance in rugby is built upon its domestic competitions, notably the national provincial championships, but they hardly rate a mention these days. In fact the calendar has become so crowded that there is barely room for it.
Instead we have Super Rugby, which gets bigger every year and is now built upon a conference format that robs it of much of it's appeal to fans, and an international season that has rendered many test matches meaningless.
Super Rugby's format is unashamedly based on money - to be financially successful the finals need to involve South African teams, and a true round robin system would not guarantee that. Same goes for the Australians.
So we have the situation where some teams never meet, at least until the knock-out rounds, and one pool that is much stronger than the others. Rugby at this level is simply a product, while many of the players, like some Olympic athletes, have become mercenaries, although at the Olympics they can at least pretend to be driven by the desire to do their countries proud.
Rugby hasn't maxed out yet though. Super Rugby is still growing, and next year we will have the Brisbane Global Tens, featuring 10 professional franchises from Australia, New Zealand, France, Japan, South Africa and Samoa.
It will only take two days to play, but this is another example of adding to an unsustainable calendar to keep the cash registers ringing, and never mind what it does to the game.
It's unlikely that anyone would want to return to the days when the New Zealand rugby season lasted three or four months and the best players, apart from the giants of the game, could at best hope to add a handful of test matches to their CVs, but there has to come a point where overload does more harm than good.
In fact we reached that point long ago. For many of us, apart from the RWC and perhaps the Bledisloe Cup, the international competition has lost its most valuable ingredient, the keen sense of anticipation that once preceded a tour and test series, and making the game's various formats even bigger isn't going to make it better.
Good things are good because they're special. Get too much of them, and they lose their appeal. The IOC and rugby show no sign of understanding it. Nor did the Romans.
