What sports should the Olympics ge rid of?

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didymus

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There are just too many events, some of them ridiculous. Dressage? Please. Lets’ limit the competition to humans.
Check out this list of sports categories & tell me there aren’t too many. Biking, sure. But track, and mountain and road and BMX?
Badminton?
Beach volleyball?

Let’s not even mention synchronised swimming.

Ah, well, it’s finally over anyway.
 
Huh? I was rather thinking we needed to add more sports to the list, like
  • Artistic Jump Rope (Individual, Paired, Team, Double-Dutch, etc)
  • Miniature Marching Band (Think a stripped-down DCI with collegiate marching style, less show/electronics/money, and more about stamina, musicality, and athleticism)
  • Skateboarding
 
Huh? I was rather thinking we needed to add more sports to the list, like
  • Artistic Jump Rope (Individual, Paired, Team, Double-Dutch, etc)
  • Miniature Marching Band (Think a stripped-down DCI with collegiate marching style, less show/electronics/money, and more about stamina, musicality, and athleticism)
  • Skateboarding
 
didymus said:
There are just too many events, some of them ridiculous. Dressage? Please. Lets’ limit the competition to humans.
Check out this list of sports categories & tell me there aren’t too many. Biking, sure. But track, and mountain and road and BMX?
Badminton?
Beach volleyball?

Let’s not even mention synchronised swimming.

Ah, well, it’s finally over anyway.
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I have no problem with any of these sports. Good luck getting rid of Beach Volleyball. It’s one of the top draws of the Olympics and one of their biggest cash cows.
 
I think we should add a few too.

Cheerleading.

Dodgeball.

Hopscotch.

Tiddlywinks.

Darts.

Snooker/Billiards.

Australian Rules football (pretty much guaranteed gold for my homeland) - balanced for fairness with the American version for the Yanks and Gaelic football for the Irish 👍

Not to mention professional whinging - I think our Australian sports journalists would come home with the gold for that. Followed closely with a silver by some of our athletes :rolleyes:
 
didymus said:
There are just too many events, some of them ridiculous. Dressage? Please. Lets’ limit the competition to humans.
Check out this list of sports categories & tell me there aren’t too many. Biking, sure. But track, and mountain and road and BMX?
Badminton?
Beach volleyball?

Let’s not even mention synchronised swimming.

Ah, well, it’s finally over anyway.
Click to expand...
As someone who owns show horses, I deeply resent your ill-informed comment. What do you think - that the riders are just up there to look pretty? You may perhaps be unaware of the years of training horse AND rider go through together to achieve the results you see in competition. It is the rider who is in control through a series of minute pressures and movements, this level of control being the result of those years of joint training, practice, and preparation.
 
didymus said:
There are just too many events, some of them ridiculous. Dressage? Please. Lets’ limit the competition to humans.
Check out this list of sports categories & tell me there aren’t too many. Biking, sure. But track, and mountain and road and BMX?
Badminton?
Beach volleyball?

Let’s not even mention synchronised swimming.

Ah, well, it’s finally over anyway.
Click to expand...
The medal count would be way different is we eliminate “sports” like

Badminton
Table Tennis
Rhythmic Gymastics (ribbons, balls, how is this a sport???)
Synchronized Swimming
 
lol

You guys forgot to give croquet serious consideration.
LilyM said:
I think we should add a few too. . .

Darts.
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I think, at one point, serious overtures had been made to turn darts into a field game , but they were unable to come up with any volunteers to play the position of goalkeeper . . . something to do with failure to design a dartproof mask.

🙂

On a more serious note , one sport I’ll never be able to watch is women’s boxing. Women having finesse in sports is one thing ; women being experts in martial arts and wrestling are most likely some of the criteria that the judges used in making their decision to permit women’s boxing at the olympics. And if a lady wants to learn the art of boxing, more power to her.

But in my heart, watching two women hit each other with their fists, for sport , remains just so terribly wrong. It doesn’t respect their dignity:shrug:
 
I guess I’m of the frame of mind that it’s better to add than subtract. I don’t personally lose anything with the inclusion of all the sports, so I’m fine with them.

I think we need to add the Centathalon. 🙂
 
LilyM said:
I think we should add a few too.

Cheerleading.

Dodgeball.

Hopscotch.

Tiddlywinks.

Darts.

Snooker/Billiards.

Australian Rules football (pretty much guaranteed gold for my homeland) - balanced for fairness with the American version for the Yanks and Gaelic football for the Irish 👍

Not to mention professional whinging - I think our Australian sports journalists would come home with the gold for that. Followed closely with a silver by some of our athletes :rolleyes:
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Interesting. Perhaps you are being sarcastic, but many of these would make good sports additions.

Cheerleading - incredibly athletic and team-oriented. Requires high level of artistic creativity, flexibility and tumbling skills, and core body strength. Also different enough from both artistic and rhythmic gymnastics.

Dodgeball - been awhile since I’ve played, but isn’t it somewhat similar to handball, except you throw the ball at opposing team instead of into goals?

Hopscotch - possibly. It’s often thought of as a children’s game but it has a relatively long documented history and is played worldwide in variations. The only downside is that it doesn’t seem incredibly athletic - the jumps and stone throws are too close. Perhaps make the board a giant one?

Tiddlywinks - definitely can be a serious international game of skill, but like chess, not terribly athletic.
 
Eliminate:

field hockey,
water polo,
dressage,
trampoline,
that indoor sport where two teams of girls try to throw a small ball into the opposite team’s goal net ( what’s the name of this nonsense? ),
diving.
 
didymus said:
There are just too many events, some of them ridiculous. Dressage? Please. Lets’ limit the competition to humans.
Check out this list of sports categories & tell me there aren’t too many.
Click to expand...
There aren’t too many. 😉 Why would this be an issue? Isn’t this supposed to be by definition the ultimate sporting competition? Golf is being added for Rio, and it’s a crime that baseball and softball aren’t still in the Olympics. That said, the most important requirement for an Olympic sport is that there are enough nations that can compete in it at the international level to make it a fair competition. That number of nations is usually around sixteen. Unfortunately, neither baseball or softball have more than that number with a chance of winning.

Ultimately, the competition is for the athletes. In a way, it’s far more important for the lesser sports to be included, because tennis has Wimbledon, soccer has the World Cup, and so on. The smaller athletes have no international showcase or championship for their talent. And yes, some of these sports don’t translate well to television, but that’s not a crime either. It’s still important to the people who play them.
 
Thy’re adding Golf? Ugh…now that’s a boring sport for TV. The guy hits the ball and you watch sky until the ball lands then you watch it roll for 10 minutes. Robin Williams was right, drunk Scotsmen invented that game as a joke on all of us. 😃

I actually enjoyed watching dressage a lot more than synchronized swimming and rhythmic gymnastics.

I’d like to see women’s softball come back, and I’d love it if they added baseball!
 
Rolltide said:
There aren’t too many. 😉 Why would this be an issue? Isn’t this supposed to be by definition the ultimate sporting competition? Golf is being added for Rio, and it’s a crime that baseball and softball aren’t still in the Olympics. That said, the most important requirement for an Olympic sport is that there are enough nations that can compete in it at the international level to make it a fair competition. That number of nations is usually around sixteen. Unfortunately, neither baseball or softball have more than that number with a chance of winning.

Ultimately, the competition is for the athletes. In a way, it’s far more important for the lesser sports to be included, because tennis has Wimbledon, soccer has the World Cup, and so on. The smaller athletes have no international showcase or championship for their talent. And yes, some of these sports don’t translate well to television, but that’s not a crime either. It’s still important to the people who play them.
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That’s funny, I was just wondering last night about the fact that I hadn’t caught any baseball/softball. I thought I must have missed the coverage (we are in a way different time zone to London)
 
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