Strange Summer Olympic Sports: Are They Good? An Investigation

The Olympics are sports. They're other stuff, too: an economic and logistical clusterfuck, a fun worldwide gathering, an opportunity to have a pair of enormous goofy variety shows in a stadium. But when you cast all that aside and look at the rickety foundations below, the Olympics are, in fact, sports.

Basketball, swimming, running, decathlon, even gymnastics: you know these sports, you may even love some of them, and you pretty much get them. But what about the other events? The stuff you probably aren't watching, or only watch every four years? Are they good sports? Are you missing out on something when you watch Deep Space Nine reruns instead? I wanted to find out. So I logged onto the website YouTube Dot Com, ran a few searches—the 2012 Olympics are archived in full on the site, which is neat—and made some brief critical evaluations of a whole bunch of sports no one watches. I did so using three criteria:

ENERGY: Does it seem fun? Does it expand your sense of the limits of the human body?

UNDERSTANDABILITY: Do you get what's happening? If you see someone screw up, can you nudge your compatriots and say "Damn, they screwed up pretty bad?"

NARRATIVE FORCE: Does the sport tell a tale you can relate to? Since there's no way you're going to be able to really grasp the nuances of the sport, you're going to need to be swept away by some kind of basic force.

Let's explore:

Narratively, there aren't a lot of sports that tell a clearer, more elegant story than a good ol' fashioned shoot-off at the archery range. Who has more steel? More steadiness when it counts? Who isn't WILTING UNDER THE PRESSURE? The string and the soul tightening in harmony, mushing into literal and metaphorical cheeks and noses, fighting against only nerves and the gentle sway of the breeze, signified only by the subtle swaying of short sleeves—that's just high-quality prime-rib sportsmeat, there! It's only half-an-hour a match, too, so you get a lot of bang for your buck!

The only problem is that, on a visceral level, it's tough to understand how the world's best archers using these Rube Goldberg-ass bows—what, for instance do all the knobs do?—can't just hit a bullseye every time. You do not stand in awe of these people, except, perhaps, for the grace they exhibit in crashing the festivities rocking a bucket hat and a dad bod and still getting that sweet jewelry hung around their necks. Is what you just read some ignorant shit? Yes, absolutely. It's the same thing that makes a particularly stupid non-sports consumer watch a basketball game and wonder aloud, "Hey, why don't they just dunk it every time?" It's dumb, for sure, but it's real.

This deficit is on the broadcast. There is very little visual information about the distance these dudes are shooting from—70 Meters, 230 feet, just short of one-and-a-half Olympic sized-sized swimming pools, which is just an extraordinary distance to square up using only your eyes and a bowsight—to give you a real sense of how profoundly impressive it is to shoot an arrow into a tiny target that far away. If the broadcast would just mix in some overhead shots, they could give the audience a real sense of how breathtaking the level of skill on display is, and bump up the very real pressure and drama the event creates. This is, honestly, just the matter of getting the right drone in the right position. Still, even without all that, I grade this HIGHLY watchable sports.

The rollercoaster of the player daintily holding the birdie, which is maybe the silliest looking piece of sports equipment imaginable, flipping it across the net, and then the immediate flurry of explosive, limits-of-human-reflexes-and-decision-making play is one of the most jarring things you can see in The Strange Sports. Badminton's very existence is befuddling, honestly, but the product is the ultimate competitive test of reflexes. A long rally overflows with both the subtle pleasures of God-body reflex and the more visceral thrills of speed and power.

The only way this event could be improved is if we really brought the audience in and lit the court with a single overhead lamp. I want to feel doom bearing down on these guys while they hold their goofy birdies. Closeups of sweat, dappled in yellow light, slowly falling from their faces. An excruciating silence highlighting every hit, every strike, every return. Badminton is the sport of the future. Badminton is, secretly or not, dark.

This event is goofy as shit. Not canoeing itself, taming the river with nothing but your paddle and your focused personal beef. That's inherently honorable, and essential to human endeavor at large. All nature must know the feeling of humanity's calloused hand shoving it over; all nature must realize it is subservient to our whims. But building a fake river waterslide, strapping the contestants into little canoes, and demanding they hit all the slalom points along the slide? That is extremely goofy.

Even the competitors must know this in their hearts. They didn't start white water rafting in fake rivers. Once upon a time, they were the kings of the rapids, tamers of God's watery thunder. Adventurers! The fresh air, the smell of the trees, the white of the moving water: those noble elements were what they needed to feel truly alive in this crummy gray world. Then one day, they decided to abandon all that for the cheaper, transient thrills of victory, medals, and television.

Next thing you know, you're strapped to a doofy fiberglass kayak and paddling down a fake river just so you can get a little bit of recognition. I refuse to believe that any of these people are the best canoers in the world, because someone who TRULY looks to dominate is only interested in conquering nature itself, not scaling mankind's arbitrary mountains. It is events like this that make the Olympics an unwieldy disaster to stage. Do not watch this event.

Like Badminton, Indoor Track Cycling is most memorable as an exercise in tactical and traditional absurdity smushed up against the thrill of white knuckle speed. The competitors spend the first minute or so of the race circling around each other, riding their bikes as slowly as possible, trying to get perfect position for the actual beginning of the race, playing an arcane chess game before exploding into straightforward sprint that even particularly smart dogs could probably understand. There is a moment of disassociation between the slowness of the bikes and the normal-speed existence of, like, dudes on the sideline eating hotdogs that is totally hilarious. I'm a pretty big fan of this Olympic sport.

Look, I tried to keep and open mind about Dressage, which is the name the Olympics agreed to use for the sport of horse dancing. I tried to find the value in the sport that is more commonly and thoroughly mocked for being included in the Olympics than any other. Empathy and understanding! Everyone has a dream, and I can find the beauty in those dreams! If I can find it here, I said, I can find it ANYWHERE.

But, everyone: Dressage is bad as shit. Top to down, left to right, it is a bad sport. Even the best of these horse dances can really only trot, trot faster, and gallop very briefly. They "dance," I suppose, but it's not like you really sense the inner connection between the horse's heart and the music. The horse just kind of looks depressed, like they're getting yanked around the circle by their rider. They are bad dancers, but moreover they don't want to be at the party in the first place.

And the music they use: holy wow, it is bad. I thought that, at least, an event that is as openly geared towards the pretensions and predilections of the idle rich would indulge in some form of pretension that could fake sophistication, setting all this goofy horse trotting to Debussy or something. Instead, these poor, noble beasts are shoved in front of the world and forced to prance to musak covers of popular 80's hits. If you want to watch a horse grimly trot around a dirt patch to "Hot in the City," then Dressage is your sport. Otherwise, continue to passively ignore or mail your congressman and demand this barbary be stopped. Free Horses!

Better than dressage, just because the horses kinda looks like they're having a good time. Still, you wish they could free themselves into the goodness of nature and run FOREVER, like the majestic beasts nature intended them to be. Bronco bucking should be an Olympic sport, just so we can see Horsekind really stick it to these trash-ass humans on the international stage. Maybe an Olympic event where people see how long they can straight up fight Gorillas? Just spitballing.

Fencing is sword fighting, which is the best way human beings have ever killed each other. It's a shame the event doesn't begin with a brief blood-drawing ritual, but other than that it's a lot of fun. Foil is less fun, because they get hit almost immediately.

Handball is kind of like a simulacra of a team sport. There's a ball and a goal and some tactics and restrictions and marginal physical contact. If human self-awareness is "an emergence," a colossal weirdo coincidence that just happened to crop up from the fertile soil of the human brain, then handball is sort of like a sport that emerged from the idea of "Sports" over the concept's 1,000-year existence. If you told an alien what team sports were, this is the guess that they would make about what form they actually take. (Aliens cannot imagine something as disrespectful and beautiful as dunking, or as arcane and arbitrary as baseball.)

That's not to say it's not a good sport. Handball has fast breaks, off-ball movement, some honest-to-goodness blocking and line play, clever exploitations of space. Strikers slipping bounce shots past defenders through tiny little slivers of space is kind of amazing to watch, and it's a shame handball's broadcast resources aren't up to the level where cameras can really scope out these plays and give them the slow-motion halo they deserve. You sense, in your heart of hearts, that if you watched this thing all the time, you could eventually develop a real taste for it. You could even find yourself sitting in front of the TV, cheering for the Portland HandBoys and despairing the Seattle HandOffs, complaining about the officials, tossing back brewdogs, farting into you couch. Unfortunately, only three sports can really capture the public's imagination at a time, and until American football is finally declared illegal, there will always be an obstacle in this noble sport's path.

Also, I'm a fan of this goalie. In soccer, the goalie just kind of sits around and screams at dudes until everyone fucks up so bad that a goal gets scored; here, our man here is severely dwarfed by the space and the tactics of the game, and so has to place actual pride in his work. You really appreciate him.

Soccer with sticks, frankly. Everyone is crouching. Why aren't the sticks longer? Very strange sport. Also, from a purely logistical perspective, they should have ice hockey during the summer and field hockey during the winter. The Winter Games could use a sport where the athletes wear shorts.

I have gone skeet shooting before. As far as relaxing activities go, it's not bad, even if it is just simulated bird hunting. I still didn't expect that I would have the patience to sit through an entire hour of skeet shooting on television, but it's actually kind of fun. How could I, or you, or any other non-shooting enthusiast, possibly devine the micro-movements and split second reactions that constitute a good shot at a clay pigeon? I honestly am not sure I can answer that, but there's something sort of thrilling about seeing a bunch of puffy dudes in coats and goofy hats try to stand perfectly still and steel themselves to pay better attention than everyone else in tiny little margins. It's like watching a meditation competition, but with dadbod dudes blowing smoke out of shotguns barrels.

Also, you get to watch nervous micro-movements:

And, more important than anything else, the pigeons are BRIGHT ORANGE and when you hit them a BRIGHT PURPLE dust sprays in every direction. That is some wild color selection, no matter what you're doing! I recommend this sport.

Synchronized swimming should probably be a purely artistic endeavor. You and your family should be able to go to the local synchronized swimming theatre, a black box with 500 seats surrounding a small swimming pool, and enjoy an evening of this fine art form. Take in a little chlorinated culture. Get out of the house for once.

Unfortunately for the art of pool-dancing, that will probably never happen. The fact of the matter is that a pool that ONLY existed to exhibit the talents of synchronized swimmers would be poorly attended at best. For this fine art form for to even get its foot in the chlorinated pools of the world, it has to bend the knee to the forces of sport, compromising its fundamentally artistic origins and taking on the burdensome weight of judging; its sole international exposure is invariably marred by some ex-synchronized swimmer and a half-informed announcer talking over the music that scores the performance.

Still, even in this non-ideal manifestation, synchronized swimming offers many pleasures. The air these swim-dancers manage to get off these throws is absolutely spectacular, and the dancing is so precise and geometric, especially if you just finished watching the heap fire that is dressage. But it's hard not to feel like synchronized swimming could be better, and more truthful to itself and its intentions, if it shed the sports pretext forced upon it by capitalism. Some art should simply be for art's sake.

If Synchronized Swimming is made worse by its association with Sports, Rhythmic Gymnastics is made whole. It's gymnastics, but with goofy ribbons and pink balls. It stares sports in the face and slaps it with a big goofy fish, and then says "OOPS" and giggles for twenty minutes. Every sport should endeavor to these heights of absurdity and whimsy. Regular gymnastics doesn't have ribbons or bright pink balls. As such, it's frankly inferior to its rhythmic sister and should take its proper place, second in line. Also, dressage could learn something from their music selection.

Trampoline is fine. If it were a regular gymnastics event, it would be the most boring one. The competitors just aren't doing enough flips to justify the use of a trampoline. The routines are very short and not terribly varied. I'll bet it's really fun to do, but it's not terribly compelling to watch. Perhaps if they affixed cameras to the competitors' heads? It's kind of like watching gymnastics without either the element of raw power—people heaving their bodies into the goddamn air with nothing but their legs and a little tiny springboard—or the ribbons/balls factor from rhythmic gymnastics. All smell, no food. Eminently skippable.

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