Better Know A Prospective Olympic Sport

Twenty-six sports applied to be in the 2020 Summer Olympics. Some of them are normal enough sports—football, bowling, racquetball, squash—but some, well, let's just say they would make the Olympics a lot more like summer camp. Let's get to know some of these wacky sports. We may be watching them on TV in five years while Bob Costas laments the lost sanctity of the Olympiad…if he's done railing about the lost sanctity of the ESPYs.

Underwater sports: these are played in space while flying around in little saucers. A team gains points for disabling an opponent's craft with laser beams.

Now that I've just invented the greatest sport ever imagined other than curling, you will almost certainly be disappointed by the real underwater sports: these are sports you're familiar with, like hockey and football, that are played in a pool and with fins and snorkels.

All of the underwater action keeps it from being a great spectator sport. But recent underwater camera technology makes televising these events more feasible than in past years. Still, it's hard to imagine underwater sports having the appeal of sports such as, say, curling.

Air Sports: As you might have surmised with your clever deductive powers—you genius you—these sports are played in the air. Well, something is in the air, although not necessarily the humans! Model aircraft and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles—also known as UAVs, also known as drones—are included in this category.

I'm not going to lie to you, air sport friends: this is a long shot. Your sports are really not sports. Parachuting is a thing you do when invading Europe. Ballooning is the only thing more boring than watching baseball, which is also not an Olympic sport. None of these events have near the appeal of the internationally renowned sport of curling.

No, air sports have moved on from mankind. The only way I see the Olympics including an air sport is if Dronefighting becomes a sport. I don't know exactly what Dronefighting is, but I'd watch the shit out of it.

Korfball: Think basketball, but no backboard. Originally invented in the Netherlands in 1902, Korfball has a few things going for it other than its glorious name.

Korfball has no men's league. The sport is only played in mixed teams or all-women's. This automatically makes Korfball the world's second greatest sport, behind only curling, which will now have an Olympic mixed doubles event.

In comparison to other prospective Olympic sports go, Korfball is quite more popular internationally. The International Korfball Federation claims over 60 members, including the United States Korfball Federation based out of Wheeling, West Virginia. Feel free to contact David Warren if you're interested in starting a Korfball league in these United States. I'm sure he's a very nice man.

Netball: basically the same thing as Korfball, as far as I can tell. I'm sure you Korfball/Netball aficionados will lambast me for saying these two sports are the same, similar to how my fat college roommate shouted at me every time I said butter and I Can't Believe It's Not Butter are identical. Shut up, you cannot tell the difference.

Orienteering: Orienteering is a sport about not being lost. No, seriously, here's the description of this "sport" from USA Orienteering:

"Orienteering is a race in wilderness navigation using a map and compass."

I imagine these people who refuse to use a GPS when driving—because it "takes the adventure out of life" or some Luddite party line—constantly get lost, show up late to things, and enrage their family who are sick of peeing by the side of the road while Dad looks at a map on the hood of the car by moonlight.

Here is a 53-minute Orienteering course for your convenience:

Tug of War: Fuck yes, now we're getting somewhere. "The decisive contest; the real struggle or tussle; a severe contest for supremacy," according to Oxford English Dictionary. Now that's a sport! Tug of War was an Olympic sport from 1900-1920 and it should be again.

Quick intermission for the greatest sports story you'll hear today, guaranteed: in early 1975, ABC held a "Superteams" competition in Hawaii in which representatives from the Super Bowl opponents Pittsburgh Steelers and Minnesota Vikings battled it out in "an epic, 16-minute tug-of-war on the sands of Waikiki," as Jim Caple recounted for ESPN. I highly recommend reading the whole oral history—although this was written in 2009, before we called such things "oral histories"—but here's Dave Osborn:

"We were too tired to celebrate. We were exhausted. It took a long time to recover. I've never been so totally exhausted in my athletic career. My arms—I couldn't even move my arms for a complete hour. You were so tense for so long, your muscles just locked in that position. I had gloves on—we all wore cheap handball gloves—and I couldn't open my hands to get the gloves off."

Now, I'm not going to sit here and pretend people don't die in Tug of War. People sometimes die. Or have their arms torn off. Or have their skin ripped off their hands. At the risk of getting into serious victim-blaming territory, they're usually due to substandard rope, improper tug-pulling technique, or just plain negligence. (Also, several took place while trying to get a Guinness World Record. How many people do you think have died trying to set a Guinness World Record? 20? 50? 200? Thousands?!)

An underrated Tug of War aspect is that the coaches can stand mere feet in front of their pullers and shout at them the entire time:

We need more tug of war in our lives. Bring back tug of war, IOC. Give it to the people.