With each edition of the Games, the debate over which activities should be classified (or not) as Olympic sports resurfaces. This year, Paris has decided to integrate breakdancing, with each host city being able to select up to four additional disciplines. Many observers questioned whether this was a good or bad idea.
But this sport is far from being the first “unconventional” activity to be invited to the Olympics. Tug of war, pistol duel, motorboat race… In the modern history of the Olympic Games, unusual (and often ephemeral) events are legion, as CNN recalls.
For most of us, tug of war is an activity reserved for schoolyards, campsites or summer camps. However, for twenty years, it was a hotly contested Olympic event. The British topped the discipline, winning five of the ten medals awarded. Tug of war was presented for the last time at the Antwerp Games (Belgium) in 1920. As is often the case, it was the British team, then made up of London police officers, who won the gold medal.
Obstacle course… swimming
If you assiduously follow the Paris Games, you have surely stopped at pistol shooting. A nonchalant Turkish shooter and a charismatic South Korean competitor were particularly talked about, both for their style and for their success. But the targets weren’t always inanimate objects… As horrible as it sounds, in 1900 Paris, participants had to shoot as many live pigeons as possible. Around 300 birds are believed to have been killed during the ordeal. The winner, the Belgian shooter Léon de Lunden, is said to have shot down twenty-one during the tournament.
The discipline having been abolished immediately, the organizers imagined the pistol duel for the London Games in 1908. The competitors, face to face, wore protective clothing. Their pistols were loaded with non-lethal wax bullets. Without that, there probably wouldn’t have been a silver medalist…
As for aquatic events, we can cite the swimming obstacle course. In this discipline from the 1900 Paris Games, swimmers had to cover 200 meters on the Seine while going over and under a series of obstacles. It was Australian swimmer Frederick Lane who won gold during this edition, in two minutes and thirty-four seconds.
Another surprising aquatic discipline: synchronized swimming… solo. Although the title may seem contradictory, the discipline was present in three consecutive editions. Launched at the Los Angeles Games in 1984, this sport had little success with television viewers, before disappearing from the Olympics after the 1992 edition, which took place in Barcelona. Tracie Ruiz-Conforto is a flagship athlete in the discipline: she won a gold medal in Los Angeles as well as a silver medal in Seoul in 1988.
Motor boat races were even held in London in 1908. But this was a failure due to rough seas. Only two nations, France and Great Britain, took part in the event and received the only medals in the sport, which has never been reintroduced since.
Let us not forget art which, from 1912 to 1948, had its place alongside sporting disciplines. Literature, architecture, music, sculpture, painting… Pierre de Coubertin, the father of the modern Olympics, wanted to recreate the ethics of ancient Greece. In 1912 in Stockholm, he himself won a gold medal in the literature category with a work entitled “Ode to Sport”, a prose poem written in French and German, presented under the double pseudonym of Georg Hohrod and Martin Eschbach.
The last Olympic art medals were awarded at the London Games in 1948, in a context where most members of the artistic categories were professionals, who no longer adhered to the ethos of amateurism of the Games.
