It is time again for the Olympics, the athletic world’s great placemark when competitors of all stripes and plaids come out of relative anonymity to compete in sports you only care about once every four years or so. As it says on the backwards-worn baseball cap of the great Olympic break-dancing champion B-Boy Bouffant, “I break for a living so that you don’t have to.”
The idea of an Olympic Games first took root nearly 3000 years ago during the turmoil of the first Persian Invasion of Greece—or #pig1 as they refer to it on TikTok—when a soldier named Gregory Podia was sent from the battlefront near the village of Pepsi to the main Greek army camp in Cocapolis to procure liquid refreshment for the troops. The distance was approximately 42 kilometers, and it took him 3 hours to complete (not counting commercial breaks). Legend says that upon his arrival at the Cocapolis camp, he was asked why he ran all the way rather than borrow a horse. He shrugged his shoulders and said, “I dunno!” before falling down dead from exhaustion. In honor of Gregory “No Reason” Podia, the Greeks began a rather meaningless tradition of drinking huge amounts of caffeinated sugar water at regular intervals during the day. To work off the ensuing buzz, they also decided to host grand tournaments showing off feats of strength and skill.
The original Olympic games lacked a break-dancing competition, but they included several other events we don’t see today, many of which were not mere athletic performances. There were also contests in more aesthetic areas, such as painting, music, and oration. For example, the original Olympics had—in addition to standard boxing—a head-to-head intellectual argument event, informally known as “rhet battling” in which two amateur sophists would stand in a ring and try to knock each other down with jabs of irrefutable logic. The last recorded champion in the sport was Homerus Flatus of Naxos, who at the 644 BC Games, defeated his opponent in the third round with a withering barrage of assertions that the proliferation of societal laws and regulations demonstrated a weakening of public morals rather than an improvement.
Argumentation contests did not survive as Olympic events into the present day. Other sports that once commanded fans’ attention but have since been forgotten include club swinging, motorboating, and pistol dueling (really!). Let’s follow the demise of each of these events individually. Club swinging was a gymnastic event in which the athlete would dance around on a mat while swinging two bowling-pin-sized clubs. More recently, as we all know, the gymnastics floor exercise has allowed other types of swingable, toss-able objects, such as balls, batons, and shiny streamers—“cat toys” as I call them. But for some reason, club swinging never gained traction. Imagine a gymnast throwing around a pair of bowling pins, and you have to wonder how close we were to having an Olympic juggling event.
Motorboating most likely didn’t last long at the Olympics because, compared to most other standard aquatic competitions, it required the use of a much larger body of water, which was often located far from the downtown arenas where the other events were held. (As far as I know, there has never been any attempt to hold short-track motorboating events in the diving pool.) In 1908, Great Britain won the gold medal in the 40-mile motorboating race at Southampton Water, but nobody at the stadium back in London knew about it until the teams came back into port. By then, all the champagne was gone.
Pistol dueling was less dangerous than it sounds. According to the Topend sports website (Wood, 2019), athletes fired at human silhouettes rather than each other. Nevertheless, the silhouettes were human-shaped and dressed in frock coats. It’s no wonder that many spectators found the sport a little too morbid and chose instead to go down to the waterfront to try and spot the motorboats. Still, a genuine face-to-face dueling competition might have saved the Olympics a bit of money, seeing as there would have been no need to hand out silver or bronze medals.
I know which event I’ll be watching most closely at this year’s Olympics: the protesting. I hear the USA has a lot of great young talent in this event this year, but the hosting French side have dominated the field for generations. Whoever wins, it’s sure to be a highlight of the Games.
Reference
Wood, R. (2019). Pistol duelling at the 1908 Olympic Games. Topend Sports. https://www.topendsports.com/events/demonstration/dueling-pistol.htm
