A Far Cry From the Marathon: Unusual Olympic Events of Modern Times
- The modern Olympics have included some surprisingly strange events — tug of war, croquet, pigeon shooting and even competitive art — all since retired from the Games.
- Demonstration sports like horse skijoring, sled dog racing, and cane fighting have also appeared at the Olympics, further showing the Games have always had a quirky side.
- Strange Olympic events don’t just belong to the past — new ones continue to pop up, and more are on the way!
Running, jumping, swimming, weightlifting, wrestling — as Olympic events, these make a certain sense to us. Prowess in those activities has been a matter of survival for humans down through the ages. Arguably, the same could be said for skiing and skating — in some climates, those skills have existential value. (Evidence for both dates back more than 5,000 years, incidentally.) We understand that events like these measure skills and abilities fundamental to our existence.
But others? Not so much. What critical ability is demonstrated by holding a 16-pound steel ball under one’s chin and then pushing it 70 feet through the air? Why would it be useful for you and a bunch of your friends to put your heads under the water and kick your legs back and forth above it? (Isn’t it generally better the other way around?) And what of the ability to accurately guide a big stone across a patch of ice using a household broom — was there an existential need for that, historically?
Still, as odd as some of today’s Olympic events seem, they pale in comparison to others that have come and gone since the modern games began in 1896.
Here’s a far-from-comprehensive list.
Tug of War
This summer-camp favorite was actually an Olympic sport beginning in 1900. It reached the end of its rope in 1920, after which it was pulled in the interest of streamlining the games.
Croquet
Croquet appeared only once in the Olympics, in 1900. France won all the medals because they were the only country fielding teams. Crowd control was not a concern — there was a single paying spectator.
Dueling
The 1906 games in Athens featured dueling pistols. The targets, thankfully, were human-shaped dummies. These games were referred to as the Intercalated Games, intended to be held every four years in Athens, but this would be the only occurrence, and the records and medals from those games are not recognized today by the International Olympic Committee.
Pigeon Shooting
Would that the idea of using dummy targets had occurred to the organizers of the 1900 games in Paris! Instead, for the pigeon-shooting contest they used live birds, more than 300 of which flew their last. Live targets were replaced with clay pigeons in later games.
Hot Air Ballooning
Another one-time event at the 1900 Paris Olympics, ballooning awarded medals for distance, duration, elevation and targeting. The competition had its ups and downs, and was not brought back in 1904.
Motorboat Racing
In the 1908 London games, motorboat racing made its only Olympic appearance. Bad weather wreaked havoc, with only one boat able to finish each of the three races. The event was dropped from future games out of concern for the weather and the fact that most team members didn’t really have to do anything to earn their medals.
Art
From 1912 to 1948, in addition to medals for physically demanding events like pole vaulting and the marathon, the Olympics gave out medals for the arts — awarding them in categories including painting, sculpture, literature and architecture.
Plunge for Distance
In the 1904 games in St. Louis, contestants would dive into the water and then remain motionless while gliding for sixty seconds or until their heads surfaced. Whoever got the farthest was the winner. This sounds more like something your dad would do in the backyard, and perhaps that’s how American gold medalist William Dickey “trained.” He won with a distance of just over 62 feet.
Events That Never Got Off the Starting Block
There were other oddball events that never rose above the status of demonstration sports at the Olympics, including:
- Cannon shooting in 1900
- Horse skijoring in 1924 (skiers pulled by horses)
- Sled dog racing in 1932
- Bicycle polo in 1908
- La Canne (cane fighting) in 1924
- Pesapallo (Finnish baseball) in 1952
So accustomed were we to strange Olympic events of yesteryear that a reporter’s 2008 April Fool’s Day story about poodle clipping at the 1900 Olympics, later circulated on the internet and, stripped of its hoax origins, began to be picked up by newspapers and other outlets prior to the summer Olympics that year and treated as fact. (To be fair, was it much more outlandish a proposition than croquet?)
But at least today all this silliness is long past us, right?
Unless you count 2024, when we had Olympic breakdancing.
Or 2028, when skateboarding will become an official Olympic event.
Interested in learning more about where the Olympic Games began? Olympia is one of the stops on Road Scholar’s A Mythical Journey: Stories That Shaped Modern Greece. You can explore the ruins of the ancient gymnasiums, baths and stadium where the athletes competed. And that’s not our only program in Greece — see our full collection of adventures there by land and sea!
