The Olympics are upon us and whenever the Olympics is upon us I realize that there is just too much sports.
Allow me to clarify and I will use swimmer Michael Phelps as an example. Now, I don’t want to take anything away from the achievement that Mr. Phleps is in the middle of completing (not sure that he will, but he might) but the fact that one athlete can make a serious attempt at taking eight medals, maybe all gold, in the Olympics one year shows that we have a problem and swimming is it’s most shiny example. There are too many events with too little diversity.
I might be a little on the purist side but here’s my idea: Swimming is about swimming fast so for starters let’s just have one style of swimming, the fastest one. Swimming is than about being explosive (swimming fast for a short period of time) and/or endurance. Let’s then just have a sprint race, maybe the 50m or the 100m, and one endurance race, 3 km or 5 km. This will get us down to four events, two fore males and two for females.
The downside of this will be less TV coverage and because of that less money to the commercial TV networks. The upside will be, in an Olympic sense, that one medal is enough and hard to win on it’s own and that the athletes who grab that medal will actually have a true achievement under his or her belt.
No don’t get me wrong, I know taking an Olympic gold is hard enough as it is but it seems to me that you have to do something like Mr. Phelps is about to do to get recognized.
Swimming is of coarse not the only sport with this problem, Track and Field is another example. Just the track running: 100m, 200m, 400m, 800m, 1500m, than add to that the hurdle races.
I often imagine a two kids dialogue when I wonder about how all these events came to be:
-”I can run faster then you.”
-”Yes, but I can run faster than you if we run twice the distance!”
-”Ok, but I’m still faster if we have to jump over stuff whilst running!”
…and so on.
My idea for Track and Field is the same as the one for swimming: one race for speed, one for endurance.
Long jump and triple jump is even more ridiculous:
-”I can jump further than you.”
-”Yes but I can jump even further if we jump in three steps”
When I was little we used to have Track and Field at gym class in school but since all the Track and Field throwing events are too hard technically we had Kast med liten boll (Throw with a small ball), the object of which was to throw the ball the furthest. Isn’t that what all the trow events are about? Abolish the shot put, the hammer throw, the discuss and the javelin and have Throw with a small ball instead.
I have several more ideas fore Track and Field but I’ve proved my point enough for this post.
I also think that in sports where men and women can compete against each other, so should be done. I am thinking about all of the shooting events. Fact it that in The 1992 Olympics in Barcelona men and women competed against each other in the clay pigeon shooting event. There was one woman, and she won over all the men. After that women were not allowed and when they finally were allowed back in, in 2000 I think, there was two separate classes: men and women. Regression!
I know I now might sound as though I hate sports, I don’t (just the old men ruling over them), I love sports. I watch it all the time and I get worked up and enjoy it. I just want there to be sports not techniques.
To end I would like to put forward an example. Take the most popular sport in the world, football (soccer). Why don’t we do it like this: We have the regular game then we ad one where they play on a smaller Field, one where they play with a heavier ball, one where they only can touch the ball once before giving it to another player and so on. Would that be ok?
