Yes! That’s were I was heading, but couldn’t think of the name of the show.
Maybe it could start as a pre-show at monster truck events?
Except that it has already been done. Jousting is the state sport of Maryland. It is no longer guys trying to dismount each other from their horses, it is to gallop your horse down the track and attempt to spear small rings with the use of a lance. Check out the National Jousting Association website.
Not to worry. Sometimes they became unhorsed and broke their backs. And they did, of course, hunt down peasants with lances and skewer the shit out of them, so there’s that, too.
Glad I could put you back in a better mood.
Compare: A dude riding a horse trying to spear small rings with a lance
with
Two dudes riding motorcycles in opposite direction, flames and fireworks flying up all around, trying to unseat each other with lances
Nah, it’s not the same 
As a Marylander, I have always been vaguely embarrassed by this wimpy modern form of jousting. We need to make it a contact sport again. It would probably be less dangerous than a rodeo.
Edit: we could have three forms of jousting – bicycle, horse, and motorcycle. You could go to a tournament and see all three happening simultaneously in different rings.
Sumo wrestlers!
I’m glad to see someone takes my suggestions seriously. A little frightened, too.
In that case the only horse, of course, is the pinto.
I have a couple of good ideas to reduce the death rate of jousting without compromising its excitement.
-
A key piece of body armor, mostly stiff, encompassing the head, neck, and upper torso, with extra protection for the head. (Imagine the shoulder pads of a football player fused to his helmet.) The rider would have very little ability to move his head around, but he probably wouldn’t need to. This piece of armor would also provide an ideal canvas for all kinds of majestic and terrifying decoration – horns, fins, plumes, etc.
-
Attach the riders by ropes to a sort of zipline device above the track, so that when they get unhorsed they swing around in the air rather than falling. This would be incredibly funny.
Why modernize it? Just bring it back. It’d be great for HDNet.
Why stop at ziplines? Let’s have big piles of green slime and pitch it to Nickelodeon. 
ETA: Extra bonus… If anybody gets hurt, it’s only a kid! “Come on, Sonny Jim, getting stabbed in the shoulder with a lance while riding a motorcycle, then falling into a vat of green non-toxic slime builds character!”
Hey come on! We wanna keep it cool (hence the flames and the fireworks), not turn it into some lame Nickelodeon style game show 
The ziplines would be more American Gladiators style (btw, is that show still being made?)
True, we want to go for awesome, not easy money. Anybody can do easy money.
IIRC, it was canceled, but they have recently started a remake of the show. My mother mentioned it to me once and I even caught part of an episode of the new series a year or two back. I don’t know if that is still on or not.
So how do you win a joust? I mean, clearly if one person ends up off their horse while the other is still on it, that’s a win, but what if both or neither fall? I guess if one person whiffs completely with their pole while the other hits (even though neither falls), that’s probably a narrow win, but I can’t think of any other clear tiebreakers, other than ‘try again’.
Plus, do we want each match to be a single ride or best-of-three/five/seven?
Just for somewhere to start, how about a match of five ‘Clashes’ (a clash is one round where the two jousters come together. Hey, every sport needs a little jargon.) where a knockdown is worth 10 points, and just hitting the other guy is worth four. Like baseball innings or soccer tiebreaker penalty kicks, you don’t ride clashes that can’t effect the outcome of the match (so if the score is say 30-0 after three clashes, or 38-24 after four, the match is done). If tied after five, keep going. Seems like enough to reduce luck but not take too long or be too grueling. Though I have no idea if this would require multiple horses per jouster.
Each clash only lasts 10 seconds or so, but allow 10 minutes to re-horse, so non-overtime matches should be under an hour. Have three matches going on at once (coordinating so no two clashes happen at the same time), to fill in dead time. With slow-mo replays, that should do it.
I see two-day single-elimination tournaments where each contestant has three or four matches. This would put stamina into play, but isn’t marathon levels of exertion. Though I don’t know if the impact/bruising would make this unreasonable.
Good suggestions Quercus! But I still say bikes instead of horses 
Mainly since it would be that much easier to persuade the monster truck/american gladiator-loving crowd to watch it.
Well, that’s what the swords are for.
I don’t understand why we can’t have jousting on motorcycles AND horses. We have different forms of car racing, different disciplines in gymnastics or swimming, different sorts of rowing - I think this needs to be an Olympic sport and we need both equestrian and motorcycle jousting.
For motorcycle jousting I’d suggest you’ll need a long track because in my version the rules state each jouster must be going at least 160 kilometres per hour at the moment of impact. I know this would likely result in the explosive bisection of some of the jousters, not a few beheadings and impalements, and even possibly cause some of the motorcycles to crash and be flung at a hundred miles an hour, spewing flaming gasoline, into stands filled with shrieking, terrified fans, but hey, no pain no gain.
It might get too expensive, though, since you’d have a very good chance of wrecking a motorcycle on every single “clash”. But then, horses are very expensive too.
Actually, with blunt swords that could be a viable idea. You have to keep your sword sheathed until your pole hits, but after that if you can pull it out and whack the other guy with it, you get extra points.
For the motorcycle version, how about motorcycle jump jousting? Two riders go off ramps and try to hit each other with poles in midair!
Naw, use motocross bikes. Those suckers can take a beating. Just getting knocked off and laying the bike down won’t do much (if any) damage - unless they were doing 160 like RickJay suggests.
Over a shark pit?!? Yeah!
Sadly, while jump jousting would be the coolest thing evah, it would probably also be quite lethal. I don’t think you could make the zip line thing work.