Idea for a new Reality Show: Greatest All-Around Athlete

Cafe Society
1

The structure would be the basic one: collect a group of contestants, have a task each week, eliminate the one who does worst each time. Last three face off in the finale. In this case, we would be looking for the person who is best in an overall mixture of athletic abilities. Not just fastest or strongest or most coordinated or most dextrous but the one who is best combination of all sorts of athletic traits.

So each week’s tasks would be different. Not in the sense of this week is a race and next week is a strength task, but that EACH week’s tasks would test some mixture of abities. Such as:

Week One: There are 100 volley balls spread out on a football field, and a bin at one goal. The bin is relatively tall – maybe eight feet? – and just whatever dimensions it would take to hold the 100 balls. One by one the atheletes tackle getting all the balls into the bins as fast as possible. So the task takes not just running speed, and some endurance, and a bit of control to toss the balls in accurately, but it also involves some strategy: what’s the best way to go about it? Possibly run about kicking all the balls towards the bin, then gather and toss as a group? Maybe collect as many balls as you can carry and run them to the bin? How close do you bring them? Throwing from further away will take less time, but more arm strength, and you’d be more likely to miss. Etc. I think you would have to keep the competitors from seeing how the earlier ones did it, but they could know what the times to beat are.

Week Two: You have a stack of awkward, heavy objects. Maybe like hay bales? And you have to haul them from the starting stack and stack them somewhere else, with some type of obstacle(s) in between. Like get them (and you) over a fence and across a relatively narrow bridge above a stretch of water along the way.

Week Three: A mixed ‘gait’ race: part of it is run normally, part of it you must crawl, part of it you swim, part of it you have to do on stilts, part of it you do on a pogo stick, and a unicycle and so forth. Mostly speed, but how quickly can you adapt to the new thing? How coordinated and balanced and quick to learn physical tasks are you?

And so on.

Hopefully your contestants would come from a wide range of backgrounds – professional athletes from various fields, maybe military men, maybe people with physically demanding hobbies, maybe some who simply work physically demanding jobs in real life.

Who is the better all around athelete? The Navy Seal or the football player? The garbage man or the basketball player? The guy into parkoor or the Iron Man triathlete?

I think it would be fun to watch.

2

Decathlon.

Also, some of the obstacle course shows from Japan would qualify.

3

If there isn’t any chance of heart-breaking humiliation you’ll never get a network to pick it up.

4

But those events are each ‘pure’ and known/trainable in advance. In ‘my’ show no one knows ahead of time what they might be asked to do. :cool:

Okay, so the loser each week gets dropped into a slime pit. :slight_smile:

5

But in your show, the random events produce a winner who might not have won with a different mix.

In the Decathlon, everyone is competing against a known standard. Best balance wins.

6

The Crossfit Games already does that. They bill the winner as the “Fittest person on Earth” so they pretty much already do what you want.

7

I think there’s enough sporting events out there that you don’t need to make up activities. Come up with a list of 100 sports or athletic activities – swimming, bowling, golf, football, basketball, tennis, racketball, bocce, running, javelin, high jump, scottish tree-throwing, and then make your contestants little-known pro- or semi-pro athletes from various sports. So your football player would do great at shotput but would struggle with curling. The gymnast would struggle at weightlifting. The drama writes itself.

Or take it a step further, and come up with a show called “World’s Best Human.” Get contestants who are at or near the top of some field that tests a facet of human existence – strength, endurance, dexterity, intelligence, charisma. One week the weightlifter has to compete against a world chess champion in a test of logical thinking, and the next week the chess champion has to lift heavy things.

The idea in casting isn’t that you’d get the strongest weightlifter, but rather you’d try to find the most well-rounded. This guy is strong but he also got a 1600 on his SAT. This chess player is smart but he also kickboxes. But they’d still all have their individual strengths and weaknesses.

8

Didn’t ABC do a show like that in the 70’s with athletes from different sports competing in a variety of events? It all depends on which events you chose - you can slant it towards any style of athlete you want to win.

9

You meanSuperstars. It looks like there were many versions in other countries.

10

Obviously the fix for that is to make the choice of the next event part of the current event. Meta-game!

11

Not just the 70s. I remember watching Superstars as a kid in the 80s and, according to your Wiki link, it stayed on the air until 2002. So I guess… it’s been done.

That said, I got a big American Gladiators vibe from the OP. Just with no Gladiators.

12

I enjoyed watching “Superstars” in the '70s; I had no idea it’d persisted for so long. I do remember how Kyle Rote Jr. (soccer player, and son of a former NFL star) dominated when he competed.

Given the large salaries that the top athletes in big sports get now (even compared to a decade ago), I wouldn’t be surprised if their teams / leagues would try to keep them from participating in such a competition today – see the note in the Wiki article about George Steinbrenner keeping his Yankees off of the team version of Superstars in the 1970s, and multiply that by a hundredfold.

13

Also, American Ninja Warrior, a show copied from Japan, did a pretty good job of testing various aspects of strength, balance, coordination, etc.

14

Wouldn’t Wipeout qualify?