Olympics - a celebration of the extent of human ability?

I think Jim is heading in the right direction with his views on what is and isn't a "sport" in terms of inclusion in the Olympics Games. I agree entirely that sports that are judged on "style" should not be there. Out go gymnastics, diving, synchronised swimming, etc.

However, I would go further. I would argue that the Olympics is really a test and celebration of what the human body is capable of. How fast can we run? How high can we jump etc?

So on that basis, the following sports will be the fundamentals at my Olympics: running, jumping, throwing, weight lifting, etc. All the sports that test how "good" can a human body do something.

However, while swimming fits this category (how fast can a human travel through water), a lot of its events will have to go. The only events I will permit are "freestyle" (in the original meaning of "any style"). I don't think it is quite so interesting to find out how fast the human body can travel through the water while restricting the movements to conform to the rules of breaststroke, etc. Backstroke goes until someone can persuade me that running backwards would make a great Olympic sport too.

Similarly walking will be right out. It's one thing to run, but quite another to not quite run in a very silly way! Why not have hopping as an Olympic sport? Or the 800m cartwheeling?

Then we come to the category of "how fast/high/etc can the human body go with the aid of some equipment?". This brings in things like the pole vault, cycling, rowing, archery, shooting. The problem with these sports is twofold. Firstly we have to argue about what restrictions apply to the equipment: size, design, etc, which may advantage one competitor over another. Secondly the risk is that the competition becomes about the technology for the equipment and not the abilities of the competitor. But then arguably, unless we return to the classical Olympics where they competed naked, we also should worry about the clothing and footwear used in many of the athletic sports and swimming as having the same problems as equipment. Since I like watching cycling, I think I will allow the "equipment sports" into the Olympics, provided the equipment is solely powered by the competitor. The kerin will have to go from the cycling (no following a motorbike). Archery is in, but shooting is out (gunpowder provides the power). If we have shooting, we'd really have to open up the Olympics to the use of machine guns and tanks.

Then we come to "team" sports. I am not sure that team sports really have a place in the Olympics, they are really more "games" than tests of human ability. Out goes football, handball, basketball, softball, baseball, hockey, volleyball.

What about team events in things like running, swimming, cycling, rowing, sailing? Hmm, they tend to measure a composite human ability rather than individual ability. I am a bit undecided about them, but I think they should go in favour of individual events. The catch with rowing is that you need two people (one oar for each side), but then there is sculling and canoeing and kayaking which can all be done with one person so rowing bites the dust under this policy.

Having disposed of team events/sports, what about the one-on-one sports? Table tennis, taekwondo, etc. My feeling is that the ball games are just that: games, so out go tennis, table tennis and badminton. Boxing, wrestling, fencing, taekwondo and judo are measuring the human ability to kill another person, but in these civilised times, we seem to worry about the competitors being killed and so we create a lot of complicated rules for how you can sort-of-pretend-to-kill another person, which gives rise to the various beat-em-up sports. For example, TKD invites you to kick people's heads but not punch their heads. Really they have to go. Or if they stay, lets introduce a new event freestyle killing (no rules and to the death).

So, I think I have considerably reduced the number of events in the Olympics to those which satisfy the intrinsic requirement: that they measure and celebrate the ability of the human body to do something measurably better than anyone has done them before. I have probably eliminated everybody's favourite sport, including a few of my own, but they can run their own international competitions.

Now all I have to do is get onto an Olympic committee or two and implement my masterplan.