Poetry was an official Olympic event
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
- Pigeon racing
- Cannon shooting
- Life saving
Among other interesting entries.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Discontinued_sports_a...
Also I have to imagine Pickle Ball will be featured in the next Olympics. Maybe it can take break-dancings spot.
https://www.topendsports.com/events/demonstration/bowling.ht...
Normally bowling alleys are expensive because of the machinery, but the Olympics aren't lacking in manpower. Just dedicate one person per lane to manually setting the pins. If you dress them up a bit that can even add some visual flourish.
I don't know anything about 'high end' bowling, but I cannot see how it could be any more expensive than many other sports at the Olympics.
Winter sports and some older competitions probably match that, but I think they try to be more aware of that for summer sports. Compare it to another recent addition, skateboarding. One of the competitor's (medalist I think?) family went without electricity for a month to afford her first board, but after that it with some luck it was affordable enough to get her to the Olympics.
In terms of costs for a training spot with Olympic-like conditions it would be pretty middle of the pack and probably in the cheaper half. It's more expensive than say table tennis or marathon, but a lot cheaper than swimming, pole vault or golf, never mind the heavy hitters like ski jumping.
Plus, as another poster pointed out, I think several other sports would be rejected for the same concerns if they weren't effectively grandfathered in.
And all of the equestrian events in the Olympics.
Tim Duncan famously took up basketball after his swimming career was derailed when a hurricane destroyed the only pool on st Croix, and they couldn't rebuild it.
Including most of the Winter Olympics.
The boats they use in the Olympics are generally standardized designs that have been around for a very long time.
The most common Olympic boat is the Laser, which has been around since the 1960s. You can make one yourself if you feel like it. They'll take out a measuring tape and if all the dimensions are correct you are good to go. You could buy an Olympic-quality one from a manufacturer for $6k or less, including all the sails. You can watch out for a Craigslist post offering one up for free if you just come get it. There are stacks and stacks of them all over sailing clubs everywhere in the world - because they've been building them exactly the same for 70 years. There are so many Lasers out there people don't know what to do with them.
The exact kiteboarding thingy they use can be bought off the shelf at plenty of sailing stores for $3k or less.
Yes, the bigger boats they are using for the two-person races can get pricy, but that's just a fraction of Olympic sailing.
At that rate, Pickleball will be added in 40yrs - "Oh yeah I remember back after the Covid Pandemic, Pickleball was popular", says 60-70yr old person.
Though tbf, I'm not sure any competition with an artistic element belongs in the Olympics. I would ditch stuff like figure skating and synchronized swimming. Gymnastics can stay, but I'd prefer it be more standardized.
Still waiting for pankration's comeback and the addition of Quake 3 CPMA, though.
Don't forget that modern pentathlon is dropping the equestrian portion and replacing it with a ninja-warrior obstacle course.
Running, swimming, fencing, shooting, obstacle course.
I'm sorry, WHAT? oO
Those must have been impressive boars if they needed guns that big! ;-)
"This video has been made private"
The last time (and only one time) was in 1900 in Paris. Only two teams participated: one was France and the other of course Britain.
With older forms of the game (5-day test cricket and 1-day/50-over cricket), matches took too long and it was played by too few countries to make sense.
I’m sure another motivator to include cricket in the Olympics is to appeal to viewers in/from India, Pakistan and other south Asian countries that aren’t so prominent in other Olympic sports.
I've also seen lineman challenges where they compete to rescue a dummy from the top of a pole. Lineman is always interesting to me since nobody wants to get close to the kinda things they have to get close to, so they end up needing to do all of their own stunts.
There’s a reason most people prefer to watch professional soccer rather than pub leagues.
It use to be the Olympics were the one showcase for the non-popular sports.
Case in point, the shot put. One of the long standing "unbreakable" records was Randy Barnes shot put from the late 80s.
Ryan Crouser broke that last year and won the gold medal this year, again.
It is an incredible accomplishment but no one cares because Lebron and Steph Curry were going for the gold or why watch the shot put when you can watch break dancing.
I feel bad for anyone who is not old enough to have watched it when it was all amateurs. It was something so special.
Just have the Taylor Swift karaoke event already. I am sure that would get great ratings and that is all that matters obviously.
It sounds like your complaint is that the professionals consume the oxygen of the Olympics and prevent the rest from getting as much share of the public’s attention.
For the record, the break dancing was really fun to watch, all the track and field events are always fun to watch, and the training and dedication to all the competitors is admirable.
The real problem is that the enshitification of all modern media means that there’s not a single repo of video of all the events. Even finding the video of one specific event is a gigantic PITA.
Professionals already get good remuneration, sponsorships and glory --have a forum for the college student and for the guy or gal who really love this one activity on the side so much they're willing to give it their all despite the meager monetary reward.
I goddamned hate these billion-dollar industries contaminating the spirit. I hate the quantization of performance where they're scientifically extracting the last bit of juice that they can out of a body. What the hell is the fun in that?
Architecture and art done on ArtStation alone is superior to anything that is funded by your local government usually.
Taste is just nostalgia with extra steps. Whatever the prestige class was building when the present adults were kids (or during a noteworthy economic boom time) is "good architecture", and everything else sucks.
- Heraldry - Lyre playing - Chariot race with foals - Chariot race with ten horses - Tragedy writing
(He won all of these competitions, of course, despite having crashed during chariot racing.)
I can't really say what would comprise great poetry but I know overworked doggerel when I see it.
Today it's primarily professional and bears little resemblance to Baron de Coubertin's vision.
TIL Olympic basketball of my childhood was second-rate.
> In order to avoid competition with the World Cup, FIFA have restricted participation of elite players in the men's tournament in various ways: currently, squads for the men's tournament are required to be composed of players under 23 years of age, with three permitted exceptions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_at_the_Summer_Olympic...
Whether this describes the original reason for removing art events from the Olympics, I don't think it's why we won't bring them back.
I also don't believe it's because poetry is wildly unpopular these days. After all, how closely does anybody follow most Olympic events outside of the Olympics themselves? That's kind of the cool thing about the Olympics: they make you white hot interested in diving, curling, etc., for a little while.
Personally, I think the reason a traditional poetry category wouldn't work is because the idea that you can objectively judge poetry is anathema these days. People would hate it, call the judges sorts of disparaging things. It would only be controversial, not satisfying.
Also, poets themselves generally want their work to be appreciated in a different way other than by live, public snap judgments. Our whole orientation toward art is so different these days that this would all be an alien concept.
That said, a battle rap event seems plausible, and would be pretty interesting. But that's distinct from the type of poetry the article is concerned with, both in form, process, and tradition. Low odds that it'll happen in the short term, but it would be pretty neat if it did.
No one wants to hear that in a competition.
I dunno if it would make a good Olympic sport but I'd watch it.
Host city chooses five songs by living artists in a couple of genres, and for each song they decide whether the competition is technical or stylistic. Live performances, nothing pre-recorded, and professional musicians can represent their country of residence.
For the style variants, you could have a bunch of different judging criteria, but in the end, yes, very subjective, and the panel of judges would give ratings, drop the two highest and the two lowest, average the rest. You could even constrain this to matching the genre/style of the original, or specifying a genre/style for the performance independent of that of the original. Or could just go head-to-head and let the judges decide rather than trying to give an objective ranking.
If a host country chose "Mary Had a Little Lamb" as their "song by a living artist" then this competition is taking place in the 1830s and we'd probably need to address that first.
> 95%
For example if diving or gymnastics was purely objective, you wouldn’t need multiple judges (or any). Track and field is a lot more straightforward in most cases.
I would even go as far to say the “criteria” the judges are looking for have some analogous counterparts in poetry.
I think breakdancing was a sport for this Olympics, so poetry doesn’t seem like much of a stretch. Maybe it’s just not “exciting” to modern people?
There has been some discussion of moving to computer vision analysis for these portions.
While one could easily judge poetry by equally objective metrics, I don't think it's hard to imagine what the result would be once the min-maxers get into the game.
Love! love love love love love poet,
love! hate no! love love love throw it.
.,!.,!.,,..,,,.!!!!.,.,,.,,!!..,.!
rhyme time lime slime mime mime love,
a a a a a a glove
o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o love.Funny to think that the Olympics started out as LARPing ancient greece. Tradition old and new at the same time
The rulebook will say something like "technique A is worth 4.5 points; subtract 0.1-0.3 points if the arms aren't straight throughout the whole technique...". The judges role is then to judge if the arms where in fact straight or not. These sports are a lot more objective than people think.
Once you have finished writing the rulebook for Olympic Poetry, do you think the poetry that would result from people going through that rulebook and min-maxing their poem would actually be interesting.
Their point was that it would likely produce uninteresting poetry, not that poetry can't be judged by some set of metrics.
giving it a score based on the judge's interpretation on how the technique is scored in the rulebook — there have been plenty of unpopular interpretations over the years
Maybe no emotion will come out of it, but writing a sonnet with perfect rime riche an two alliterations delivered with perfect pitch and with the accuracy of a metronome will certainly win gold.
Olympic medalists in art competitions - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34410511 - Jan 2023 (12 comments)
I feel like there have been other threads about weird Olympic events? (not counting the 1904 marathon here which is its own niche)
The first half of the episode, which is equally fascinating, is about the 1968 Mexico Olympics.
[1]: https://pca.st/episode/3edd4bad-573d-4c3a-8430-91e5ffbd6e9f
Granted I think it would be cool to have art Olympics but also ... judging would be kind of painfully subjective.
And if it wasn't subjective, somehow, it would be horrible.
I love Hip Hop, but you can't directly compare rap between languages.
International DJ competitions could work though, I think DMC is one.