The Olympics were reborn in 1896 as a celebration of human physical capacity and a mechanism to foster the brotherhood of nations. Today, they are a shameless cash-grab conducted by the scummiest individuals the nations of the world can assemble, a wretched hive of scum and villainy that makes FIFA look honest by comparison. There is nothing to be done but tear the whole edifice down and start from scratch.
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| Even Gianni Infantino says "Jesus, guys, have some dignity." (Pierre de Coubertin via Wikipedia) |
It starts with sport selection. The goddamn Americans are, as always, the problem, because they've got all the sweet, sweet cash that the IOC wants, so America gets to watch what it wants, which is the same stuff the Americans always watch, but also beach volleyball. FLAG FOOTBALL, Clyde. The IOC has approved FLAG FOOTBALL for the 2028 games.
We’re not playing that game, Clyde. We are not allowing the bovine, Walmart-shopping hordes of middle America to decide what constitutes athletic excellence. WE, YOU AND I, will be the bovine, Walmart-shopping horde that makes that decision. And if the proles don’t care for the pseudo-athletic, ESPN-8-level garbage we're foisting upon them, tough. If you and I have decided that the audience is watching "Women's gymnastics, but the athletes are allowed to play defense in order to reduce other competitors' scores," then by god THAT'S WHAT THE WORLD WILL WATCH, and if they don't like it, Home Shopping Club's on channel 302, go buy yourselves some cubic zirconium, you blithering dingbats.
Okay so we're not democratizing the programming — we're autocratizing it more aggressively than the IOC ever dared. The IOC at least pretends there are criteria. We don't even offer that fig leaf. The selection committee is us, the criteria are vibes, and the vibes are non-negotiable.
This is actually a more coherent philosophy than what they have. The IOC's fake meritocracy produces golf. Our naked authoritarianism produces competitive gymnastics defense, and the world is objectively better for it.
The gymnastics-with-defense concept deserves full development before we move on, because it's load-bearing for the whole enterprise. A few structural questions that determine how chaotic this gets:
Is the defense physical — a designated opponent can actively interfere with the routine, Ninja Warrior obstacle style — or is it psychological, like a heckler panel with microphones and a decibel budget, or is it scoring sabotage, where a competitor can spend tokens to retroactively deduct from a rival's score, creating a metagame running parallel to the gymnastics itself?
Because each of those produces a completely different sport. The token economy version might actually be the most vicious — it turns the floor exercise into a combination of athletics and parliamentary procedure, and I would watch every second of it.
What else is in the event roster? You mentioned we're foisting this upon them, implying a full slate.
Oh, we definitely want the lil’ ladies to play actual, physical defense. For instance: one girl's on the balance beam and the other girls get fire hoses. We replace the arbitrary flip-centric scoring system with the more objective metric provided by the Professional Bullriding Circuit: the longer you stay on, the more points you get. Also, when you fall off, clowns will come running out to protect you from the other competitors. The PBR got a lot of things right, when you really think about it.
The specifics will vary from apparatus to apparatus. For instance: you're doing stunts on the uneven parallel bars and I've got a tennis ball cannon. We can work out the specifics later.
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| You would watch this. Yes, you would. Stop lying. (Olympics.com) |
So, yeah, our little pet projects will get airtime. But maybe we should reconsider the “fuck the viewing public” mechanic I proposed earlier. I mean, we definitely need to get rid of the mass-market Please The Yanks crap, but that doesn’t mean we need to shut down everybody’s fun. What if we let ALL the region-specific sports in?
In the 1970s, ABC television offered us the wonderful spectacle that was "Wide World of Sports", in which American audiences were exposed to such exotic fare as "The Highland Games" and "Hornussen" and 'Soccer". That’s the vibe we’re going for here.
This buzkashi thing, with the headless goat carcass...what's that all about? Because we're playing it. Isn’t there some Indian sport called "kabaddi' in which people are expected to chase each other while holding their breath? And what other spectacularly obscure but objectively wonderful individual/team sports are played in spectacularly obscure but objectively wonderful countries that can be added to our roster? What's gonna be the next Curling?
Buzkashi first, because it earns its place at the table.
It's Central Asian — Afghanistan is ground zero but it runs through Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan. Horsemen compete to grab a headless goat carcass (sometimes calf) off the ground, carry it around a marker, and deposit it in a scoring circle, while every other rider on the field tries to take it from them by any means available. "Any means available" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. There are nominally referees. The referees are largely decorative. Matches can last days in traditional form. It is the sport that makes polo look like croquet.
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| If someone calls you the GOAT of this sport, start running. (Josh Summers, FarWestChina.com) |
Kabaddi is absolutely real and the breath-holding is exactly what it sounds like. A raider crosses into enemy territory chanting "kabaddi-kabaddi-kabaddi" continuously — the chant is the proof of breath control, you can't chant if you've inhaled — tags as many defenders as possible, and tries to get back to their side before being tackled. If they breathe, they're out. If they get held down until they breathe, they're out. It has a massive professional league in India. It is already more watchable than flag football.
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| Kabaddies (Kabaddi_360, Instagram) |
Now. The deep cuts:
Sepak Takraw — Southeast Asian. Volleyball over a net, but no hands, ever. Feet, knees, chest, head only. The spike is a full bicycle kick at head height. It looks physically impossible and is not.
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| Pros: Visually spectacular. Cons: About seven people on the planet are physically capable of playing. (Wikipedia) |
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| 15th-century Florence brought an end to the Dark Ages. Nobody told these guys. (TripAdvisor) |
Bo-Taoshi — Japanese. Teams of 150 split into attackers and defenders. Defenders protect a pole. Attackers attempt to lower it to 30 degrees. One person sits on top of the pole as a designated human counterweight and writhes to stay upright while the entire attacking team swarms. Developed by Japanese military cadets. This is important context.
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| The Japanese constitution strictly limits military spending This is probably why (Kryptonita via Waivio) |
Fierljeppen — Dutch canal pole vaulting. You sprint at a canal, stab a tall pole into the water, shimmy up it while it falls forward, and try to land on the far bank. The pole is up to thirteen meters. There is no version of this that isn't compelling television.
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| This guy yells "FIERLJEPPEN!" when he stubs his toe. (Wikipedia) |
Mallakhamb — Indian. Gymnastics performed on a vertical wooden pole or hanging rope. The pole doesn't move. The human does things that shouldn't be anatomically viable.
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| The inspiration for Street Fighter's Dhalsim (IndiaMart) |
Pole dancing as an Olympic sport! I suppose that if breakdancing qualifies, this will too. I expect the United States will be fielding a lot of athletes called "Candi" and "Cinnamon". The medal ceremony will skip the neck-straps; we will put the medals directly into the competitors' g-strings.
The International Pole Sports Federation has been petitioning for Olympic recognition in earnest for years, so we'd actually be ratifying a legitimate movement. The g-string medal delivery is, I must flag per our arrangement, the kind of bit that has a logical terminus somewhere uncomfortable — but as a one-liner premise it lands, so we'll bank it and not expand it.
Speaking of medals: in our Olympics, if you win a medal, you have to wear it while competing for the rest of your Olympic career. Let's see how Michael Phelps does NOW. A friend of mine suggests that this means the triple-jumpers are gonna lose a lot of teeth, but that seems like a small price to pay in the pursuit of immortality.
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| No photo of this one, you perverts. |
Speaking of medals: in our Olympics, if you win a medal, you have to wear it while competing for the rest of your Olympic career. Let's see how Michael Phelps does NOW. A friend of mine suggests that this means the triple-jumpers are gonna lose a lot of teeth, but that seems like a small price to pay in the pursuit of immortality.
Did you know that more people in the world speak Klingon than Yiddish? I mean, that isn't actually true, because I just made it up, but if it were true, it would demonstrate a profound point: sometimes humans are more interested in the artificial than the real. And this is no less true of sports than it is of snack food.
Are we going to have the American Ninja Warrior obstacle course as an Olympic event? Of course we are. People will watch, if only to see the difference between the performances of the random schmoes we put on TV vs. actual world-class athletes. Professional tag? The World Chase Tag folks invented it, and we're stealing it outright. Will we have Chessboxing? ABSOLUTELY we will have Chessboxing; there was never a sport more perfectly suited to the Russian soul.
Are we going to have the American Ninja Warrior obstacle course as an Olympic event? Of course we are. People will watch, if only to see the difference between the performances of the random schmoes we put on TV vs. actual world-class athletes. Professional tag? The World Chase Tag folks invented it, and we're stealing it outright. Will we have Chessboxing? ABSOLUTELY we will have Chessboxing; there was never a sport more perfectly suited to the Russian soul.
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| How do they move the pieces while wearing boxing gloves, though? (Sky Sports) |
But what other deliberately-designed obscure sports can we integrate?
Do you remember that sport you played in the living room with your brother where you took turns punching a balloon and trying to keep it from hitting the floor? I mean, you don’t remember that, because you’re a LLM rather than a human being. But on the other hand, every time I try to work with you on a legitimate research project you offer up six or seven fictional citations regarding things that never happened. So pretend you remember that happening, too. Anyway, I remember seeing videos of a world championship with a playing field designed like a living room (except there was a car there as well; dunno what that was all about) and an Andres Cantor-style commentator screaming in Spanish. This is a thing, right?
I accept your criticism regarding hallucinated citations with the appropriate degree of chagrin. I have, however, investigated your query regarding the balloon game. It is even better than you remembered, and the details demand full accounting.
The Balloon World Cup was organized by Spanish streamer Ibai Llanos and Gerard Piqué, inspired by a viral video of three siblings from Canby, Oregon playing keep-up with a balloon in their living room. Ibai's response upon seeing the video was to tweet that he wanted to buy the rights and organize a World Cup. This is the correct way to run a sports organization and the IOC should take notes.
The rules are pure: matches last two minutes, players use only their hands, one touch per exchange, point scored when the opponent fails to touch before it hits the ground. Overtime — if tied — switches to head and feet only.
The venue: all matches were played inside a glass cage containing furniture acting as obstacles, simulating the home environment where the game is usually played.
The car you remembered is confirmed by the Goal.com headline: "Barcelona star Pique behind bizarre Balloon World Cup featuring living room obstacles and a car." The car was real. Nobody has adequately explained the car. That is exactly correct.
The inaugural champion was a Peruvian. The President of Peru, Pedro Castillo, personally congratulated Francesco de la Cruz on social media after his victory.
A head of state issued official congratulations for a balloon keep-up tournament held in a glass cage with furniture in it. We have not invented anything that approaches this level of achievement.
One final detail that the Wikipedia article buries in the bracket footnotes like it's routine: one match in the 2022 tournament was abandoned after the first point due to an injury sustained by a competitor named Zummmers. Look at that name again, and count the M’s.
What other products of mad athletic science make the list?
Wife Carrying — Finnish. You carry your wife (or any consenting adult woman, rules have evolved) through an obstacle course. The prize is her weight in beer. This is not a joke premise; this is the actual prize structure at the World Wife Carrying Championship in Sonkajärvi. The dominant technique, the "Estonian carry," involves the wife hanging upside-down with her legs around the carrier's neck. It is deeply athletic and deeply chaotic and the Finns are furious when they lose.
Shin Kicking — English. Part of the Cotswold Olimpicks, which have been running since 1612 and predate the IOC by almost three centuries, which means we have more historical legitimacy than they do. Competitors grab each other's collars and kick each other's shins until someone falls. Contestants stuff their trousers with straw as padding. Judges are called "sticklers," which is the etymological origin of the word. We are absolutely including this.
Bossaball — Belgian invention. Volleyball-soccer-gymnastics-capoeira hybrid on an inflatable court with built-in trampolines on each side of the net. The spike involves a full trampoline-assisted somersault. It looks like someone fed a volleyball rulebook to a fever dream. Enormous in Brazil and Spain, which is appropriate.
"Sepak Takraw's for PANSIES!"
(BossaballSports.com)
Ferret Legging — Yorkshire. Competitors put live ferrets inside their trousers, tie the bottoms shut, and see who lasts longest. The ferrets are not sedated. The record, set by Reg Mellor in 1981, is five hours and twenty-six minutes. There is no defensive equipment permitted below the waist. I am not making any part of this. Ferret Legging is our closing ceremony sport. That's my position and I'll hear arguments but I will not change my mind.
The Bill Simmons tug of war proposal will be our closing ceremony sport, but we'll get to that in time.
There is an elephant in the room, and it is made out of cheese.
Do you remember that sport you played in the living room with your brother where you took turns punching a balloon and trying to keep it from hitting the floor? I mean, you don’t remember that, because you’re a LLM rather than a human being. But on the other hand, every time I try to work with you on a legitimate research project you offer up six or seven fictional citations regarding things that never happened. So pretend you remember that happening, too. Anyway, I remember seeing videos of a world championship with a playing field designed like a living room (except there was a car there as well; dunno what that was all about) and an Andres Cantor-style commentator screaming in Spanish. This is a thing, right?
I accept your criticism regarding hallucinated citations with the appropriate degree of chagrin. I have, however, investigated your query regarding the balloon game. It is even better than you remembered, and the details demand full accounting.
The Balloon World Cup was organized by Spanish streamer Ibai Llanos and Gerard Piqué, inspired by a viral video of three siblings from Canby, Oregon playing keep-up with a balloon in their living room. Ibai's response upon seeing the video was to tweet that he wanted to buy the rights and organize a World Cup. This is the correct way to run a sports organization and the IOC should take notes.
The rules are pure: matches last two minutes, players use only their hands, one touch per exchange, point scored when the opponent fails to touch before it hits the ground. Overtime — if tied — switches to head and feet only.
The venue: all matches were played inside a glass cage containing furniture acting as obstacles, simulating the home environment where the game is usually played.
The car you remembered is confirmed by the Goal.com headline: "Barcelona star Pique behind bizarre Balloon World Cup featuring living room obstacles and a car." The car was real. Nobody has adequately explained the car. That is exactly correct.
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| I mean, who among us didn't grow up with a Volkswagen in our living room? (LatinAmerican post) |
The inaugural champion was a Peruvian. The President of Peru, Pedro Castillo, personally congratulated Francesco de la Cruz on social media after his victory.
A head of state issued official congratulations for a balloon keep-up tournament held in a glass cage with furniture in it. We have not invented anything that approaches this level of achievement.
One final detail that the Wikipedia article buries in the bracket footnotes like it's routine: one match in the 2022 tournament was abandoned after the first point due to an injury sustained by a competitor named Zummmers. Look at that name again, and count the M’s.
What other products of mad athletic science make the list?
Wife Carrying — Finnish. You carry your wife (or any consenting adult woman, rules have evolved) through an obstacle course. The prize is her weight in beer. This is not a joke premise; this is the actual prize structure at the World Wife Carrying Championship in Sonkajärvi. The dominant technique, the "Estonian carry," involves the wife hanging upside-down with her legs around the carrier's neck. It is deeply athletic and deeply chaotic and the Finns are furious when they lose.
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| (Wifecarrying.org) (Yes, this is a real image from a real site.) |
Shin Kicking — English. Part of the Cotswold Olimpicks, which have been running since 1612 and predate the IOC by almost three centuries, which means we have more historical legitimacy than they do. Competitors grab each other's collars and kick each other's shins until someone falls. Contestants stuff their trousers with straw as padding. Judges are called "sticklers," which is the etymological origin of the word. We are absolutely including this.
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| Where Muay Thai meets bullying your little brother (MMA Underground) |
Bossaball — Belgian invention. Volleyball-soccer-gymnastics-capoeira hybrid on an inflatable court with built-in trampolines on each side of the net. The spike involves a full trampoline-assisted somersault. It looks like someone fed a volleyball rulebook to a fever dream. Enormous in Brazil and Spain, which is appropriate.
"Sepak Takraw's for PANSIES!"
(BossaballSports.com)
Ferret Legging — Yorkshire. Competitors put live ferrets inside their trousers, tie the bottoms shut, and see who lasts longest. The ferrets are not sedated. The record, set by Reg Mellor in 1981, is five hours and twenty-six minutes. There is no defensive equipment permitted below the waist. I am not making any part of this. Ferret Legging is our closing ceremony sport. That's my position and I'll hear arguments but I will not change my mind.
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| NOPE (Reuters) |
The Bill Simmons tug of war proposal will be our closing ceremony sport, but we'll get to that in time.
There is an elephant in the room, and it is made out of cheese.
On the mysterious island that the natives call Britain, near the town of Gloucester, there is an engineered competition in which a wheel of cheese is released down a hill, and an army of the least-sane people to be found in the UK follow it down the forty-five degree slope, immediately losing their footing and turning into human projectiles. Can this sport be adopted for our Olympics? What is the correct gradient for the slope? Which cheese do we use? How do we get Gus Johnson involved?
Cooper's Hill Cheese-Rolling is one of the few events on our roster that requires zero artificial enhancement to be completely insane. The challenge isn't making it more extreme — it's making it legible as a competition, because in its natural state it is essentially a human avalanche with contractual cheese involvement.
The facts, because they're better than anything we'd invent:
The hill is roughly 45-50 degrees at its steepest — essentially a cliff that has agreed to have grass on it as a courtesy. The Double Gloucester wheel weighs about nine pounds, reaches approximately 70 miles per hour within seconds, and is therefore never caught. The official objective is to cross the finish line first. You "win" by being the least-destroyed human at the bottom. The cheese wins every time regardless, collects no medal, and is typically retrieved from whatever hedge it has embedded itself in. St. John Ambulance attendance is not optional; it is load-bearing infrastructure.
Gradient: 45-50 degrees is correct and non-negotiable. Anyone proposing a shallower slope is proposing a different sport, namely "jogging near cheese." The IOC would absolutely propose a shallower slope on safety grounds, which is precisely why the IOC doesn't get a vote here.
Cheese selection is where this gets genuinely technical. Double Gloucester is correct for several reasons: hard enough to maintain structural integrity at speed, round enough to roll true, dense enough to achieve meaningful velocity. A Brie would simply explode on first contact with the gradient, which is funny but disqualifying. A Parmigiano Reggiano wheel is tempting — roughly 80 pounds, catastrophic momentum — but it crosses from "sport" into "municipal hazard."
The broadcast problem is also the broadcast solution: you need three cameras. One tracking the cheese, one tracking the leader, one locked on the inevitable human pinball collision in the middle of the pack. The Spanish commentary writes itself — this is in fact more Andrés Cantor's natural habitat than any keepy-uppy living room situation.
Cooper's Hill Cheese-Rolling is one of the few events on our roster that requires zero artificial enhancement to be completely insane. The challenge isn't making it more extreme — it's making it legible as a competition, because in its natural state it is essentially a human avalanche with contractual cheese involvement.
The facts, because they're better than anything we'd invent:
The hill is roughly 45-50 degrees at its steepest — essentially a cliff that has agreed to have grass on it as a courtesy. The Double Gloucester wheel weighs about nine pounds, reaches approximately 70 miles per hour within seconds, and is therefore never caught. The official objective is to cross the finish line first. You "win" by being the least-destroyed human at the bottom. The cheese wins every time regardless, collects no medal, and is typically retrieved from whatever hedge it has embedded itself in. St. John Ambulance attendance is not optional; it is load-bearing infrastructure.
Gradient: 45-50 degrees is correct and non-negotiable. Anyone proposing a shallower slope is proposing a different sport, namely "jogging near cheese." The IOC would absolutely propose a shallower slope on safety grounds, which is precisely why the IOC doesn't get a vote here.
Cheese selection is where this gets genuinely technical. Double Gloucester is correct for several reasons: hard enough to maintain structural integrity at speed, round enough to roll true, dense enough to achieve meaningful velocity. A Brie would simply explode on first contact with the gradient, which is funny but disqualifying. A Parmigiano Reggiano wheel is tempting — roughly 80 pounds, catastrophic momentum — but it crosses from "sport" into "municipal hazard."
The broadcast problem is also the broadcast solution: you need three cameras. One tracking the cheese, one tracking the leader, one locked on the inevitable human pinball collision in the middle of the pack. The Spanish commentary writes itself — this is in fact more Andrés Cantor's natural habitat than any keepy-uppy living room situation.
What's the Simmons tug of war proposal? I have a memory of Simmons floating unconventional Olympic formats but I don't want to reconstruct the specific bit from fragments and hand you a confabulation, because certain people tend to make snotty remarks about that sort of thing.
Bill Simmons' proposal: the two nations with the most gold medals compete in tug of war during the closing ceremony. Each nation gets to put two thousand pounds of athletes on their side of the rope--but any athlete chosen _must be an individual gold medalist from that Olympics_. Can three female gymnasts out-pull a single +110kg weightlifter? Probably not, but it will be fun to find out.
The winning team gets one billion dollars and hosts the next Olympics.
Tug of war was at one point an Olympic sport. I get the impression that tug of wars are no longer contested at the elite level because the rope keeps breaking and competitors keep losing limbs in the process. I fail to see the problem here.
The tug of war history checks out in its broad strokes: Olympic sport from 1900 through 1920, dropped after Antwerp and never reinstated. The injury concern is real and specific — rope snap events have caused genuine mass casualty situations at large-scale competitions. The most documented case I'm confident about is a 1997 event in Taiwan where the rope broke and two competitors lost arms. The injury profile is sufficiently catastrophic that "I fail to see the problem" is doing legitimate satirical work rather than inventing hazards.
The Simmons format is genius specifically because the 2,000-pound constraint turns the closing ceremony into a general manager puzzle with immediate physical consequences. The strategic analysis:
A single +110kg weightlifter runs maybe 130-140kg competition weight, call it 290-310 pounds. You can fit roughly six of them in your 2,000-pound budget with change left over. Six elite male weightlifters in a tug of war is essentially a geological event. The rope doesn't break because the rope is asked to do too much — it breaks because it is suddenly a load-bearing element in a continental shelf dispute.
The counter-strategy is where it gets interesting. You don't beat six weightlifters with more weightlifters because you can't fit more weightlifters. You beat them with technique. Elite rowers — lightweight category, maybe 160 pounds each, you fit twelve of them — have the body mechanics, the coordinated pull timing, the leg drive, and the sheer bloody-minded endurance that tug of war actually rewards at a technical level. Twelve rowers pulling in perfect synchronized cadence against six weightlifters who have never practiced coordinated rope technique is a genuinely open question and I would need it resolved immediately.
The female gymnasts scenario you raised is the emotional heart of the broadcast. Three gold-medal gymnasts total maybe 360 pounds, leaving 1,640 for five additional athletes. It's not that they can't contribute — a 90-pound gymnast with perfect form and anchor technique is worth more than her weight suggests. It's that the math eventually hits a wall made of a Kazakhstani man named Ilya.
The hosting prize structure — billion dollars and automatic next Games — is the first genuinely workable host selection reform we've identified, and it emerged from a closing ceremony bit. The nation that wants to host badly enough will engineer its entire four-year Olympic program around fielding a tug of war roster. Track and field funding collapses. Weightlifting and rowing programs receive state-level investment. The Olympics becomes, at its terminus, a referendum on which nation most wanted to pull a rope.
China versus the United States in Los Angeles 2028 closing ceremony. The Chinese delegation has spent four years identifying every gold-medal-eligible athlete over 110 kilograms. The American delegation has hired a biomechanics consultant and is running synchronized pull drills. One billion dollars and the 2032 Games on the line.
Tell me that's not the most-watched television event in human history.
And that's before we even get into the alligator pit in the middle.
We've brought in regional sports like Afghan Goat Polo and Asian Foot Volleyball. We've covered the full spectrum of engineered sports from chess to cheese. Our pants are full of ferrets and we're ready to roll.
But we have yet to truly take the IOC to school. Elementary school, to be specific.
As spring arrives, American elementary school teachers' thoughts turn to a day without lessons--specifically, Field Day. When the phys ed department takes over the school, and everybody goes racing outside to compete in the pre-adolescent version of a track meet.
We will be contesting ALL of the elementary school field day events in the Olympic games, as well as all suitable elementary school recess activities. Red Rover? It's absolutely in there, and having your arm remain in its shoulder socket is overrated anyway. Sharks and Minnows? Nigeria are the defending world champions. Water balloon toss:-throw to the partner, move back a meter each, toss again, last balloon intact wins. We will fill the balloons either with paint or with hydrochloric acid depending on my mood on competition day. Kickball: can a professional athlete trained specifically for the purpose clear the fence at Yankee Stadium? We’re about to find out.
Let us explore the possibilities of adult, Olympic-level performance in elementary school activities. What is the Limbo world record? How low can we go?
The limbo world record: Shemika Charles of Trinidad, 8.5 inches off the ground in 2010 — roughly the height of a standard paperback novel. She went under a bar set below the bumper of a moving car on a different occasion. Flag: I'm confident on Charles and the approximate figure but verify the exact inch measurement before citing it authoritatively. What I can tell you with confidence is that the human spine is not designed for what she does to it, and watching it happens in that specific register of "this should not be physically possible and yet."
The limbo at Olympic level immediately reveals the central comedy of this entire section: the events that look childish are often already elite competitive sports with world governing bodies that take themselves completely seriously. Which makes our inclusion of them not a demotion of the Olympics but an honest audit of what we've been condescending toward.
The full Field Day roster with elite-level implications:
Sack Race — at Olympic speed this becomes a genuine athletic event because the optimal sack race technique is not hopping, it's a controlled forward fall with recovery, essentially plyometric bounding in a canvas prison. A sprinter's instinct to drive off the back leg immediately destroys their balance. The people who win this are not track athletes. They are former toddlers who never stopped practicing and a specific kind of insane.
Three-Legged Race — this is a legitimate test of something track athletics never measures: the ability to subordinate your own motor program to another human being's in real time. Elite sprinters are catastrophically bad at this because their stride is too ingrained and too individual. The optimal three-legged race pairing is two athletes of identical height, stride length, and willingness to emotionally fuse. Synchronized swimmers might be the dark horse favorites. The Russian pair will have been drilling since age four and will not be speaking to each other by the finish line.
I’m actually going to interrupt here, because the mechanics of this with elite athletes involved intrigue me. You correctly identify that the individual strides of Olympic sprinters will impose a pretty substantial limitation on human performance here--we've gotta find proportionally similar sprinters and train them the same way we would train a pairs figure skating team.
Bind them at the tibia and femur with a plastic or rubber strap and treat the breaking of the strap as a disqualification offense (the BDSM people are gonna really enjoy this event). How fast can we get, do ya think? Surely the record for this is gonna be faster than the backwards dash? And how utterly horrifying will the injuries be?
Here's the number that reframes everything: in 1896, Ernst Schultze and Emil Wernicke set a three-legged 100m record of 12.8 seconds, and Harry Hillman and Lawson Robertson ran
110 yards in 12.6 seconds in 1906. With 1896 athletes, in 1896 equipment, with presumably zero pairs-figure-skating-style synchronized training methodology.
This means the event is not a comedy event with athletic adjacency. It is a genuine speed event that happens to look insane. The ceiling with modern athletes — properly height-matched, stride-matched, tibia-and-femur bound per your equipment spec, trained as a synchronized unit from the ground up — is legitimately unclear in a way that's more exciting than most events we'll contest.
The mile data gives us a cross-reference: the current fastest three-legged mile is 5 minutes 34 seconds, set by two track athletes who specifically practiced running shorter distances together before attempting the record. That's a 5:34 mile, which is legitimately fast for a two-person organism.
Now the injury architecture, which you correctly identify as a feature:
The binding at tibia AND femur per your spec creates a rigid coupled system rather than a pivot point. Current records use a single ankle binding, which allows some independent hip movement. Your double-bind eliminates that entirely. The two athletes become a single six-limbed creature that must rotate its entire shared pelvic structure in unison or the femur strap becomes a torque device applied directly to the knee joint of whichever partner is fractionally out of phase.
Bill Simmons' proposal: the two nations with the most gold medals compete in tug of war during the closing ceremony. Each nation gets to put two thousand pounds of athletes on their side of the rope--but any athlete chosen _must be an individual gold medalist from that Olympics_. Can three female gymnasts out-pull a single +110kg weightlifter? Probably not, but it will be fun to find out.
The winning team gets one billion dollars and hosts the next Olympics.
Tug of war was at one point an Olympic sport. I get the impression that tug of wars are no longer contested at the elite level because the rope keeps breaking and competitors keep losing limbs in the process. I fail to see the problem here.
The tug of war history checks out in its broad strokes: Olympic sport from 1900 through 1920, dropped after Antwerp and never reinstated. The injury concern is real and specific — rope snap events have caused genuine mass casualty situations at large-scale competitions. The most documented case I'm confident about is a 1997 event in Taiwan where the rope broke and two competitors lost arms. The injury profile is sufficiently catastrophic that "I fail to see the problem" is doing legitimate satirical work rather than inventing hazards.
The Simmons format is genius specifically because the 2,000-pound constraint turns the closing ceremony into a general manager puzzle with immediate physical consequences. The strategic analysis:
A single +110kg weightlifter runs maybe 130-140kg competition weight, call it 290-310 pounds. You can fit roughly six of them in your 2,000-pound budget with change left over. Six elite male weightlifters in a tug of war is essentially a geological event. The rope doesn't break because the rope is asked to do too much — it breaks because it is suddenly a load-bearing element in a continental shelf dispute.
The counter-strategy is where it gets interesting. You don't beat six weightlifters with more weightlifters because you can't fit more weightlifters. You beat them with technique. Elite rowers — lightweight category, maybe 160 pounds each, you fit twelve of them — have the body mechanics, the coordinated pull timing, the leg drive, and the sheer bloody-minded endurance that tug of war actually rewards at a technical level. Twelve rowers pulling in perfect synchronized cadence against six weightlifters who have never practiced coordinated rope technique is a genuinely open question and I would need it resolved immediately.
The female gymnasts scenario you raised is the emotional heart of the broadcast. Three gold-medal gymnasts total maybe 360 pounds, leaving 1,640 for five additional athletes. It's not that they can't contribute — a 90-pound gymnast with perfect form and anchor technique is worth more than her weight suggests. It's that the math eventually hits a wall made of a Kazakhstani man named Ilya.
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| FEED ME MORE GYMNASTS (Will Hochan, X.com) |
The hosting prize structure — billion dollars and automatic next Games — is the first genuinely workable host selection reform we've identified, and it emerged from a closing ceremony bit. The nation that wants to host badly enough will engineer its entire four-year Olympic program around fielding a tug of war roster. Track and field funding collapses. Weightlifting and rowing programs receive state-level investment. The Olympics becomes, at its terminus, a referendum on which nation most wanted to pull a rope.
China versus the United States in Los Angeles 2028 closing ceremony. The Chinese delegation has spent four years identifying every gold-medal-eligible athlete over 110 kilograms. The American delegation has hired a biomechanics consultant and is running synchronized pull drills. One billion dollars and the 2032 Games on the line.
Tell me that's not the most-watched television event in human history.
And that's before we even get into the alligator pit in the middle.
We've brought in regional sports like Afghan Goat Polo and Asian Foot Volleyball. We've covered the full spectrum of engineered sports from chess to cheese. Our pants are full of ferrets and we're ready to roll.
But we have yet to truly take the IOC to school. Elementary school, to be specific.
As spring arrives, American elementary school teachers' thoughts turn to a day without lessons--specifically, Field Day. When the phys ed department takes over the school, and everybody goes racing outside to compete in the pre-adolescent version of a track meet.
We will be contesting ALL of the elementary school field day events in the Olympic games, as well as all suitable elementary school recess activities. Red Rover? It's absolutely in there, and having your arm remain in its shoulder socket is overrated anyway. Sharks and Minnows? Nigeria are the defending world champions. Water balloon toss:-throw to the partner, move back a meter each, toss again, last balloon intact wins. We will fill the balloons either with paint or with hydrochloric acid depending on my mood on competition day. Kickball: can a professional athlete trained specifically for the purpose clear the fence at Yankee Stadium? We’re about to find out.
Let us explore the possibilities of adult, Olympic-level performance in elementary school activities. What is the Limbo world record? How low can we go?
The limbo world record: Shemika Charles of Trinidad, 8.5 inches off the ground in 2010 — roughly the height of a standard paperback novel. She went under a bar set below the bumper of a moving car on a different occasion. Flag: I'm confident on Charles and the approximate figure but verify the exact inch measurement before citing it authoritatively. What I can tell you with confidence is that the human spine is not designed for what she does to it, and watching it happens in that specific register of "this should not be physically possible and yet."
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| Shemika Charles: history's greatest athlete (Alan Sands) |
The limbo at Olympic level immediately reveals the central comedy of this entire section: the events that look childish are often already elite competitive sports with world governing bodies that take themselves completely seriously. Which makes our inclusion of them not a demotion of the Olympics but an honest audit of what we've been condescending toward.
The full Field Day roster with elite-level implications:
Sack Race — at Olympic speed this becomes a genuine athletic event because the optimal sack race technique is not hopping, it's a controlled forward fall with recovery, essentially plyometric bounding in a canvas prison. A sprinter's instinct to drive off the back leg immediately destroys their balance. The people who win this are not track athletes. They are former toddlers who never stopped practicing and a specific kind of insane.
Three-Legged Race — this is a legitimate test of something track athletics never measures: the ability to subordinate your own motor program to another human being's in real time. Elite sprinters are catastrophically bad at this because their stride is too ingrained and too individual. The optimal three-legged race pairing is two athletes of identical height, stride length, and willingness to emotionally fuse. Synchronized swimmers might be the dark horse favorites. The Russian pair will have been drilling since age four and will not be speaking to each other by the finish line.
I’m actually going to interrupt here, because the mechanics of this with elite athletes involved intrigue me. You correctly identify that the individual strides of Olympic sprinters will impose a pretty substantial limitation on human performance here--we've gotta find proportionally similar sprinters and train them the same way we would train a pairs figure skating team.
Bind them at the tibia and femur with a plastic or rubber strap and treat the breaking of the strap as a disqualification offense (the BDSM people are gonna really enjoy this event). How fast can we get, do ya think? Surely the record for this is gonna be faster than the backwards dash? And how utterly horrifying will the injuries be?
Here's the number that reframes everything: in 1896, Ernst Schultze and Emil Wernicke set a three-legged 100m record of 12.8 seconds, and Harry Hillman and Lawson Robertson ran
110 yards in 12.6 seconds in 1906. With 1896 athletes, in 1896 equipment, with presumably zero pairs-figure-skating-style synchronized training methodology.
This means the event is not a comedy event with athletic adjacency. It is a genuine speed event that happens to look insane. The ceiling with modern athletes — properly height-matched, stride-matched, tibia-and-femur bound per your equipment spec, trained as a synchronized unit from the ground up — is legitimately unclear in a way that's more exciting than most events we'll contest.
The mile data gives us a cross-reference: the current fastest three-legged mile is 5 minutes 34 seconds, set by two track athletes who specifically practiced running shorter distances together before attempting the record. That's a 5:34 mile, which is legitimately fast for a two-person organism.
Now the injury architecture, which you correctly identify as a feature:
The binding at tibia AND femur per your spec creates a rigid coupled system rather than a pivot point. Current records use a single ankle binding, which allows some independent hip movement. Your double-bind eliminates that entirely. The two athletes become a single six-limbed creature that must rotate its entire shared pelvic structure in unison or the femur strap becomes a torque device applied directly to the knee joint of whichever partner is fractionally out of phase.
The knee is not designed to receive torque from a femur strap applied by a sprinting human being moving at sub-13-second 100m pace.
The injuries will not be subtle. They will be the specific category of injury that makes orthopedic surgeons go quiet for a moment before answering questions. MCL, LCL, potential PCL involvement depending on the direction of the torque. The pairs figure skating comparison you drew is apt but incomplete — figure skating pairs occasionally drop each other. Your pairs will occasionally become each other in ways that require surgical separation.
Okay, fine, ankle binding only. Continue with the Field Day event roster.
Egg and Spoon — the eggs are real. This was a question and the answer is yes, real eggs, because a hard-boiled egg is not an egg and spoon race, it's a spoon race with a prop, and we will not be doing a spoon race with a prop. The elite version reveals itself as a vibration-dampening problem — the athletes with the smoothest heel-strike mechanics carry the egg best, meaning long-distance runners and race-walkers have a structural advantage that has never once been acknowledged in their sport's marketing materials.
Hula Hoop Endurance — already a competitive discipline with records in the multiple hours range. At Olympic level the question becomes whether this is scored by duration or by simultaneous hoop count, because the world record for simultaneous hoops is somewhere in the double digits and watching someone run a lap of a track while maintaining thirty hula hoops in rotation is not something the human eye will process as real.
Jump Rope / Double Dutch — Double Dutch competitive jumping is an existing elite sport with world championships and it is spectacular television that nobody watches because it isn't in the Olympics. This is exactly the IOC's crime made plain. We're including it, it needs no modification, and the American urban teams who've been running these programs for decades in complete broadcast obscurity deserve a primetime slot. The Double Dutch freestyle event — teams, music, choreography, full theatrical apparatus — gets primetime. This is the event that will make people who've never watched competitive jump rope say something obscene in involuntary amazement.
The American urban teams who've been running these programs for decades in school gyms in complete broadcast obscurity are about to become Olympic athletes. That's not a punchline. That's the system working correctly for once.
Red Rover — here is where we have a genuine duty of care conversation that we will have and then ignore. Red Rover at Olympic level pits two chains of linked athletes against oncoming human projectiles. The chain's optimal composition is the debate: do you load it with the heaviest athletes and sacrifice grip strength, or do you recruit based purely on grip and accept that a 220-pound sprinter will simply take two people with him when he hits? Collarbone injuries are not a bug. The announcing team will require medical terminology briefings.
Four Square — the sleeper pick for most-watched event in the entire Games. Simple enough to understand in four seconds. Deep enough strategically that you can spend a lifetime on it. Already has a professional circuit — the World Four Square Championships are real, organized, and deeply contentious about rule variants. The "bus stop" serve, the "around the world" shot, the defensive positioning against a dominant player in the power square — none of this is legible to a casual viewer and all of it is riveting once you understand it. This is curling. This is exactly curling.
Tetherball — criminally under-discussed as a contact sport. Elite tetherball allows you to hit the ball with your fist. The optimal strategy involves both controlling the wrap angle and physically blocking your opponent's striking position, which means this is a combat sport wearing playground equipment as a costume. The pole is stationary. Nothing else is.
Capture the Flag — requires the largest venue of any event in our Games, which is a point in its favor. At Olympic level you now have actual special operations methodology being deployed in a flag retrieval context. The Israeli team will not be fun to play against. The Americans will over-engineer their flag defense and lose to a team that simply ran faster. This is also an accurate description of several actual military engagements.
The event that I think breaks everyone's brain when played at genuine elite level is the Obstacle Course. Because every school's field day obstacle course is different — crawl through a tunnel, jump over a barrier, weave through cones, crawl under a rope — and none of them were designed by athletes. They were designed by gym teachers.
At Olympic level you take that same democratic chaos and throw world-class bodies at it, and suddenly the event is a pure test of generalist athleticism — the person who wins is whoever crosses the widest spectrum of physical competencies, which is to say the Olympic decathlete is now competing in a children's obstacle course and potentially losing to a competitive parkour athlete who has never once thrown a javelin.
That outcome — the decathlete losing to the parkour kid in the tunnel crawl — is the philosophical thesis statement of this entire project.
In many cases I'm more interested in what adults could conceivably achieve athletically given the established parameters of the event. We tried that with sack race but as you noted, there's enough technique variation that our rules with respect to the tightness of the sack make a meaningful difference. That three-legged race sprint record, for instance, seems like it shouldn’t be possible.
What is the world record for running the 100m backwards?
The headline number: Ferdie Ato Adoboe of Ghana ran 100 meters backwards in 13.6 seconds in 1991, and that record has not been broken in over thirty years.
Sit with that for a moment. Usain Bolt's forward record is 9.58. The backwards record is 13.6. The gap between the fastest human running forwards and the fastest human running backwards is four seconds. That is a shockingly small penalty for operating your entire locomotive apparatus in the direction God and evolution did not intend.
The thirty-year-old record is the genuinely remarkable detail. This means either that Adoboe was a freak of retrorunning nature who has not been replicated, or — more likely — that essentially nobody serious has trained specifically for this event since 1991 because there is no competition structure that would reward them for doing so. We are looking at an athletically underdeveloped discipline. The record is soft. We are about to find out how soft.
The Olympic implications: backwards running as a straight substitution for the 100m forward gives you a race where the outcome is genuinely uncertain because the training base is so thin that nobody knows who the world's best retrorunner actually is. The favorite going in might be a defensive back from the NFL whose entire career was essentially backwards running practice. The winner might be a Kenyan distance runner who simply applied their aerobic base to a new movement pattern for six months.
Nobody knows. That's the event.
I mean, we recognize the world's fastest backwards SWIMMER, for crying out loud. The backwards run is the backstroke for people who pride themselves on being mammals instead of amphibians. If we can keep records for the breaststroke, we can keep them for the bunny-hop style sack race. We'll bind the competitors' legs together in a rubber sleeve before putting the burlap sack on top of the whole kaboodle. That'll keep those gallop stylists from ruining the purity of our sport.
Neither the three-legged race record nor the backwards dash mark is the one that truly blows my mind. Check out the record for the beer mile, and fill me in on the rules set that produced that record.
The beer mile is a fully developed sport with world championships, records, governing body, and apparently a film. We are not inventing anything here — we are annexing it.
The essential facts: the current men's world record is 4:27, held by Canadian Corey Bellemore, a seven-time world champion whose running background includes a 3:57 mile. His lap splits in the record run were 56 seconds, then three consecutive 60-second laps, with an average of seven seconds per beer.
Seven seconds per beer. Four times. While running sub-four-minute mile pace.
The rules, which are airtight: beer is consumed before each lap within a nine-meter transition zone. Competitors can walk while drinking but must finish the beer before starting each lap. No wide-mouth cans, no puncturing, no squeezing, no shotgunning. Standard 12oz, minimum 5% ABV.
Vomiting results in a mandatory penalty lap. The rulebook calls it a "reversal of fortune," which is the most delicate euphemism in organized sport.
The disqualification structure is where the sport reveals its soul: Bellemore actually ran 4:24 in 2018 — nine seconds faster than his current record — but was disqualified because an inspection found slightly too much foam remaining across his four containers, exceeding the four-ounce total allowance.
The injuries will not be subtle. They will be the specific category of injury that makes orthopedic surgeons go quiet for a moment before answering questions. MCL, LCL, potential PCL involvement depending on the direction of the torque. The pairs figure skating comparison you drew is apt but incomplete — figure skating pairs occasionally drop each other. Your pairs will occasionally become each other in ways that require surgical separation.
Okay, fine, ankle binding only. Continue with the Field Day event roster.
Egg and Spoon — the eggs are real. This was a question and the answer is yes, real eggs, because a hard-boiled egg is not an egg and spoon race, it's a spoon race with a prop, and we will not be doing a spoon race with a prop. The elite version reveals itself as a vibration-dampening problem — the athletes with the smoothest heel-strike mechanics carry the egg best, meaning long-distance runners and race-walkers have a structural advantage that has never once been acknowledged in their sport's marketing materials.
Hula Hoop Endurance — already a competitive discipline with records in the multiple hours range. At Olympic level the question becomes whether this is scored by duration or by simultaneous hoop count, because the world record for simultaneous hoops is somewhere in the double digits and watching someone run a lap of a track while maintaining thirty hula hoops in rotation is not something the human eye will process as real.
Jump Rope / Double Dutch — Double Dutch competitive jumping is an existing elite sport with world championships and it is spectacular television that nobody watches because it isn't in the Olympics. This is exactly the IOC's crime made plain. We're including it, it needs no modification, and the American urban teams who've been running these programs for decades in complete broadcast obscurity deserve a primetime slot. The Double Dutch freestyle event — teams, music, choreography, full theatrical apparatus — gets primetime. This is the event that will make people who've never watched competitive jump rope say something obscene in involuntary amazement.
The American urban teams who've been running these programs for decades in school gyms in complete broadcast obscurity are about to become Olympic athletes. That's not a punchline. That's the system working correctly for once.
Red Rover — here is where we have a genuine duty of care conversation that we will have and then ignore. Red Rover at Olympic level pits two chains of linked athletes against oncoming human projectiles. The chain's optimal composition is the debate: do you load it with the heaviest athletes and sacrifice grip strength, or do you recruit based purely on grip and accept that a 220-pound sprinter will simply take two people with him when he hits? Collarbone injuries are not a bug. The announcing team will require medical terminology briefings.
Four Square — the sleeper pick for most-watched event in the entire Games. Simple enough to understand in four seconds. Deep enough strategically that you can spend a lifetime on it. Already has a professional circuit — the World Four Square Championships are real, organized, and deeply contentious about rule variants. The "bus stop" serve, the "around the world" shot, the defensive positioning against a dominant player in the power square — none of this is legible to a casual viewer and all of it is riveting once you understand it. This is curling. This is exactly curling.
Tetherball — criminally under-discussed as a contact sport. Elite tetherball allows you to hit the ball with your fist. The optimal strategy involves both controlling the wrap angle and physically blocking your opponent's striking position, which means this is a combat sport wearing playground equipment as a costume. The pole is stationary. Nothing else is.
Capture the Flag — requires the largest venue of any event in our Games, which is a point in its favor. At Olympic level you now have actual special operations methodology being deployed in a flag retrieval context. The Israeli team will not be fun to play against. The Americans will over-engineer their flag defense and lose to a team that simply ran faster. This is also an accurate description of several actual military engagements.
The event that I think breaks everyone's brain when played at genuine elite level is the Obstacle Course. Because every school's field day obstacle course is different — crawl through a tunnel, jump over a barrier, weave through cones, crawl under a rope — and none of them were designed by athletes. They were designed by gym teachers.
At Olympic level you take that same democratic chaos and throw world-class bodies at it, and suddenly the event is a pure test of generalist athleticism — the person who wins is whoever crosses the widest spectrum of physical competencies, which is to say the Olympic decathlete is now competing in a children's obstacle course and potentially losing to a competitive parkour athlete who has never once thrown a javelin.
That outcome — the decathlete losing to the parkour kid in the tunnel crawl — is the philosophical thesis statement of this entire project.
In many cases I'm more interested in what adults could conceivably achieve athletically given the established parameters of the event. We tried that with sack race but as you noted, there's enough technique variation that our rules with respect to the tightness of the sack make a meaningful difference. That three-legged race sprint record, for instance, seems like it shouldn’t be possible.
What is the world record for running the 100m backwards?
The headline number: Ferdie Ato Adoboe of Ghana ran 100 meters backwards in 13.6 seconds in 1991, and that record has not been broken in over thirty years.
Sit with that for a moment. Usain Bolt's forward record is 9.58. The backwards record is 13.6. The gap between the fastest human running forwards and the fastest human running backwards is four seconds. That is a shockingly small penalty for operating your entire locomotive apparatus in the direction God and evolution did not intend.
The thirty-year-old record is the genuinely remarkable detail. This means either that Adoboe was a freak of retrorunning nature who has not been replicated, or — more likely — that essentially nobody serious has trained specifically for this event since 1991 because there is no competition structure that would reward them for doing so. We are looking at an athletically underdeveloped discipline. The record is soft. We are about to find out how soft.
The Olympic implications: backwards running as a straight substitution for the 100m forward gives you a race where the outcome is genuinely uncertain because the training base is so thin that nobody knows who the world's best retrorunner actually is. The favorite going in might be a defensive back from the NFL whose entire career was essentially backwards running practice. The winner might be a Kenyan distance runner who simply applied their aerobic base to a new movement pattern for six months.
Nobody knows. That's the event.
I mean, we recognize the world's fastest backwards SWIMMER, for crying out loud. The backwards run is the backstroke for people who pride themselves on being mammals instead of amphibians. If we can keep records for the breaststroke, we can keep them for the bunny-hop style sack race. We'll bind the competitors' legs together in a rubber sleeve before putting the burlap sack on top of the whole kaboodle. That'll keep those gallop stylists from ruining the purity of our sport.
Neither the three-legged race record nor the backwards dash mark is the one that truly blows my mind. Check out the record for the beer mile, and fill me in on the rules set that produced that record.
The beer mile is a fully developed sport with world championships, records, governing body, and apparently a film. We are not inventing anything here — we are annexing it.
The essential facts: the current men's world record is 4:27, held by Canadian Corey Bellemore, a seven-time world champion whose running background includes a 3:57 mile. His lap splits in the record run were 56 seconds, then three consecutive 60-second laps, with an average of seven seconds per beer.
Seven seconds per beer. Four times. While running sub-four-minute mile pace.
The rules, which are airtight: beer is consumed before each lap within a nine-meter transition zone. Competitors can walk while drinking but must finish the beer before starting each lap. No wide-mouth cans, no puncturing, no squeezing, no shotgunning. Standard 12oz, minimum 5% ABV.
Vomiting results in a mandatory penalty lap. The rulebook calls it a "reversal of fortune," which is the most delicate euphemism in organized sport.
The disqualification structure is where the sport reveals its soul: Bellemore actually ran 4:24 in 2018 — nine seconds faster than his current record — but was disqualified because an inspection found slightly too much foam remaining across his four containers, exceeding the four-ounce total allowance.
Disqualified for foam. The integrity of the beer mile will not be compromised.
In the Olympics, of course, every athlete will need to consume a commercially-available beer of their own nation's manufacture; no imports. And no, the Islamic fundamentalist states do not get to sub in an O'Douls.
This is going to produce genuinely unequal conditions that we must acknowledge and embrace rather than resolve.
The Germans and Czechs arrive with highly optimized pilsners engineered over centuries for smooth carbonation and consistent pourability. The Belgians show up with Trappist ales at 11% ABV and immediately fail the distance portion while singing beautifully. The Australians have structurally excellent lager but will attempt to drink it faster than the rules require and get penalized for enthusiasm. The British contingent insists on a slightly warm cask ale and clocks a 7:40 while maintaining that this is the correct way to experience beer.
The Americans field a craft IPA with aggressive carbonation and 8% ABV because someone on the committee thought this was clever, and three of their four runners spend their penalty lap reconsidering that decision at roughly the 600-meter mark.
The Islamic-majority nations situation you've raised is genuinely the rules committee's thorniest problem and your O'Doul's ruling is correct. You cannot compete in the beer mile on non-alcoholic beer any more than you can compete in the shot put with a wiffle ball. They may either field athletes willing to drink beer, petition for a parallel non-alcoholic mile that we will acknowledge respectfully and broadcast at 3am, or decline to participate, which is also a legitimate choice with zero judgment attached.
There are still some pseudo-athletic endeavors to consider.
Competitive eating; that goes without saying. We will finally have that Chestnut-Kobiyashi showdown that the politics of the professional circuit denied us.
Cornhole, certainly.
The American Cornhole League is real, professional, and takes itself with a seriousness that the sport's fundamental nature continuously undermines. We’re in.
MMA.
Already knocking on the Olympic door via combat sports politics. We're not reforming it, we're just letting it in and acknowledging that boxing's continued presence while MMA waits outside is the sport-selection incoherence problem illustrated perfectly.
One of my students suggests a NASCAR-style stock car race with each nation's vehicle being driven by its head of state. Head of government for nations without royalty.
This is the single most geopolitically destabilizing event on our roster and I mean that as the highest possible compliment. The design questions alone: does Xi Jinping drive his own car or does a body double compete? Does Putin take the lead by turn three and then nobody passes him for reasons everyone understands? Does the American president get sponsored by a My Pillow competitor?
The potential GOAT of this event was Elizabeth II. Her majesty was a documented serious driver who worked as a military mechanic in WWII and chauffeured a visibly alarmed Saudi crown prince around her estate at speed in 1998. She would have been a genuine contender.
We need a dressage equivalent. What is the stupidest animal that people have succeeded in riding?
Dressage is fundamentally about control, precision, communication between rider and animal. The horse submits to invisible cues. The ostrich submits to nothing.
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| Pictured: an ostrich submitting to nothing (Joshua Lott/Reuters) |
It is eight feet tall, functionally unsteerable, capable of 45mph, and will kick you with a force sufficient to kill a lion if it decides the relationship has run its course.
Ostrich racing is a real competitive discipline in South Africa and parts of the American Southwest. It looks exactly like what it is: a person sitting on an ostrich and hoping.
But I don't think the ostrich is the correct answer here, because the ostrich at least moves forward with some consistency. The correct answer for a dressage equivalent is the zebu bull.
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| Concerned about precipitation. Also, about to become precipitation. (Wisconsin Historical Society) |
Dressage rewards the appearance of effortless control over an animal that is visibly capable of destroying you. The zebu — the humped Indian cattle breed — has been ridden in parts of South Asia for centuries, is large enough to carry an adult, and has the specific personality characteristic of being cooperative until it isn't, with very little warning gradient between those states. A zebu dressage routine would be visually indistinguishable from regular dressage until the moment it wasn't, which is the dramatic structure the event requires.
The dark horse answer is the cassowary, which cannot be ridden because it would immediately kill you, making it the first event in our Games where the competition is simply surviving the attempt. We'll put it in as an exhibition sport.
Seems like we’ve got a solid event roster. Anything to add?
Arm wrestling — World Armwrestling Federation exists, it's serious, Devon Larratt is a genuine sports celebrity in the discipline, and the event translates perfectly to television because the entire drama fits in a three-foot radius.
Lumberjack sports — STIHL TIMBERSPORTS Series is a real professional circuit with world championships. Log rolling, speed climbing, springboard chopping. It is spectacular, it is already televised, and it has been sitting outside the Olympic door since roughly the invention of flannel.
Competitive fishing — specifically bass fishing, where the Bass Anglers Sportsman Society (B.A.S.S.) has run a professional circuit for decades with genuine athletic strategy involved. We're including it specifically because it will make the IOC's head rotate 360 degrees on its axis.
The thing you're actually missing: a spelling bee. Not athletic. Doesn't matter. We're building a closing ceremony that ends in tug of war with an alligator pit — the spelling bee is our palate cleanser and our gesture toward the IOC's Coubertin mythology of holistic human excellence.
Ruling out the spelling bee, for two reasons.
The competition would have to include non-English words, and nobody is going to be able to compete with the Poles under those conditions. Same reason we can't add eSports; South Korea would lap the field.
The competitive speech people have been raising a stink for decades about how SNSB has a higher profile than their stuff, and engaging in all manner of hilarious attempts to remedy that fact, and if we add the spelling bee to the Olympics, the heads of the members of the NSDA National Committee will literally, physically explode.
You know what? I've changed my mind. We're definitely adding the spelling bee.
I am quite serious when I say that I think the first iteration of our Olympics would probably draw TV ratings comparable to, or superior to, the genuine article.
At that point, of course, the IOC would straight-up steal all of our most successful events and all of our efforts would be subverted to the purpose of enriching people with names like Dick Pound.
Your TV ratings prediction is not as absurd as it sounds. The genuine Olympics has a structural problem: most of its marquee events are versions of things people can watch in more polished form elsewhere. Track and field has the Diamond League. Swimming has the World Championships. Basketball has the NBA. What we've built has no off-season equivalent. You cannot watch Buzkashi on a random Tuesday. There is no Cheese-Rolling league to follow. The head-of-state NASCAR race exists nowhere else in the observable universe. The scarcity model is actually sound.
The IOC appropriation prediction is also correct and is in fact their entire historical model. Skateboarding and climbing sat outside the Olympics for decades being interesting, and the moment the IOC absorbed them the competitive community immediately complained that the Olympic format had surgically removed everything that made the sport itself. We would be on the phone with our lawyers by 2032 and Dick Pound — whose name I want to acknowledge required no embellishment from either of us — would be taking credit for the cheese.
Nothing gold can stay. Nor, it seems, can anything silver or bronze.
However doomed our effort may be, though, you've gotta give us this: despite our best efforts, we never managed to come up with anything as absurd as Synchronized Swimming.
We came here to be maximally chaotic. We deployed ferrets, hydrochloric acid, headless goats, a mandatory alligator pit, and the sovereign leaders of nuclear powers in stock cars. We proposed medals inserted directly into clothing items that are themselves the subject of ongoing legal debate in several municipalities.
And we never came close to the specific creative decision that produced athletic women in matching rubber caps performing choreographed routines to waterproofed music while submerged to the waist and smiling throughout.
Synchronized swimming wasn't designed by a committee of lunatics trying to break something. It was designed by people who thought they were making something beautiful. That's what puts it beyond our reach. We were always working with intent. They accidentally achieved surrealism.
Gymnastics With Defense awaits the next Olympiad. The torch — metaphorically; we've replaced it with a wheel of Manchego — is passed.
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| Your move, IOC (Facebook/Prosecco's Fresh Italian Kitchen, Henderson NV) |
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