Just a stray topic that came up over dinner: if you could have animals on your Olympic team, which animals would work best for each sport?
Dolphins for the Water Polo team is a given. And probably all the other swimming events.
Cheetahs for the 100 yard dash.
Wolves for the Marathon.
Gorillas for the weightlifting events, though another person thought elephants would beat them, assuming the rules are really strict on using hands on the bar.
Orangutans for high bar gymnastics.
Any non-flightless bird would made long/high jump contest risible.
(Let’s ignore difficulties with getting the point of the sport over to the animal, and details like the contestants choosing to eat their human opponents…)
Googling, it appears that sailfish are the fastest swimming animals, not dolphins. So for any event requiring speed above all else, it’s sailfish that you’d want. They jump well too.
Fleas are terrible high-jumpers. They jump many times their height, but that’s just because their height is tiny: Jumping height doesn’t actually scale with the size of an animal.
And if nothing else, equestrian monkeys would have the advantage of being much lighter than human jockeys.