Candlepin bowling. The maximum theoretical score has never been approached.
She’s the friend of a friend, coworkers. She did amazing!
An old idea of mine could certainly be extended to include Olympic competition:
A modest proposal:
It has long been known that encouraging a widely shared activity with a bit of healthy competition is both an excellent way to build community, and to keep the citizenry distracted.
Ideally, one gets the children involved during their early education, then gradually ramps up their involvement through both participation and spectation, until as adults it becomes a major focus of their lives AND an excellent marketing opportunity.
Proposed: in grade school, the children be taught to build birdhouses and bat houses; in middle school they could advance to doghouses & cold-frames; high-schoolers could easily build yard sheds and bus shelters. Forming into work teams and advancing into college, barns and greenhouses would be great opportunities for practice. Upon graduation, those who had excelled would be recruited into regional teams, competing against each other to erect homeless shelters, community centers, food banks. Midwinter, the best and brightest of each region would compete on national TV to erect health clinics.
There could be roles for all manner of participants - one thrills to think of handsome young men in tight pants leading waves of cheers as nimble women race up ladders and relay shingles to their captain at the peak, waiting to drive the last nail with her golden hammer and win the trophy for that year.
Oh, yeah. She’s a machine. Gets out to a lead and then just grinds it out, and good luck catching her - all you’ll see is her race pack, disappearing in the distance.
-Pankration
-MMA
-Dueling
-Five-Finger Fillet
-Caber Toss
-The Mesoamerican Ball Game
-Chariot Racing
Parkour.
Great minds think alike.
A Washington Post article claims adding cricket would bring 1.4B fans to the Olympics. I’m guessing most of them live in just a few countries, though.
The Olympics used to have a tug-of-war. That would be pretty sweet. But it was REPORTedly discontinued to make room for Red Rover, Frozen Tag and British Bulldog.
I think the main problem with cricket is, it requires fields specific to the sport - more so than baseball - and we are back to the problem of, “What do you with the stadiums when the Olympics are over?”
I think a baseball diamond is pretty specific to that sport. What else can it be used for? And lots of sports require special facilities, like a velodrome for track cycling events, or those waterways used for kayaking and canoeing slalom (though those look like they would be fun to use recreationally).
I suppose cricket could be added as a one-off competition for Olympics that are hosted in countries where cricket is popular and already have plenty of cricket fields, like England or Australia / New Zealand.
Kind of like how baseball was included in the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo and expected to be in the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles, even though it was removed from the permanent Olympic program following an IOC meeting in 2005.
I’d like to see a decathlon type multi-sport event spanning the whole of individual games, not just track and field. Swimming and diving, weightlifting and gymnastics, archery and rowing, etc.
There is the modern pentathlon, which combines fencing, swimming, equestrian, running, and pistol shooting.
I find that decidedly un-modern, and way too restricted and small compared to what I’m looking for, which is a sampling of the whole Olympics.
The champion of the hectathalon really would be the greatest athlete in the world. But to get to a hundred “sports”, you might have to throw in karaoke, line dancing and parcheesi. How many individual sports are there?
I’ve wondered what events I’d put in a winter pentathlon. I’ve got speed skating, giant slalom skiing, luge, and cross-country skiing, but I need one more. Snowboard cross seems like the best choice.
Ski jumping of course!
A wise man once asked, “how many sports are there (for individuals)?”
This has an answer. That answer is forty-eight. But also 120. And 205. Though the list is far from complete. I’d pay to see an event where the same athlete has to skeet shoot, rally race, dogsled, skateboard, pommel horse, bullfight, box and go ballooning.
Is that reply to my suggestion of a winter pentathlon?
I thought of ski jumping, but there’s already an event, the Nordic combined, which pairs ski jumping with cross-country skiing. If I put both those events in my winter pentathlon, then athletes from the Nordic combined would have two good events already.
Curling