Dumping Them Out: Dumbest Olympic Sports
Welcome back to another episode of Dumping Them Out. Before I get into listing the dumbest Olympic sports (summer edition), I sent a tweet out the other night that I deeply regret. I was at a bar for a friend's going away party. It was an "all you can drink for 40 dollars" situation, so I was well lubricated. Lubricated enough to think this was a clever trivia question to pose to Twitter.
Nobody was even close to answering correctly. So naturally, after a couple more tequila sodas, for no reason whatsoever, I decided to up the ante.
But what I'm now realizing is that the answer to this question is very possibly too stupid to answer. But at the same time, I still think it's gettable.
The prize is now up to $32. The number of answers trickling in have slowed down. Which means that soon everyone will forget about this tweet. But I know that there's someone out there with the right answer. Someone who's bookmarked this tweet, and two years from now will come out of nowhere with the answer I'm looking for and I'm going to have no choice but to Venmo them $800. Really wish I hadn't tweeted that.
Anyways, here are the dumbest Olympic sports
Handball
Every four years when the Olympics come around they claim that they love handball. It's a sport people watch and think, "I would be good at that, or "LeBron James would be great at that". But I've tried to watch handball multiple times this Olympics. It's not entertaining. It's a boring sport. There's no fun plays, or cool moves, or impressive shows of athleticism & skill. It's just a handful of slightly above average athletes passing a ball to each other, then leaping in the air and throwing it at a helpless goalie who tries to spread his limbs out as far as possible in hopes that the ball might hit him on it's way to the back of the net. It's a sport that was invented by a 10-year old in his backyard. "What if we just have 2 goals and throw the ball in the net?!" It's a bad sport.
Triple Jump
In most cases, track & field events make sense. They're all very natural seeming competitions that measure an athlete's basic athletic abilities. Who can run the fastest over various distances… Who can jump the longest with a running start. Who can jump the highest with a running start. Who can throw a heavy object the farthest (shotput, discus).
Then there's a few weird ones. I don't know where pole vaulting came from. I don't know why they decided to attach a long rope to the shotput and call it the "hammer throw". I don't know why the steeplechase makes athletes run through a kiddie pool mid-race. But I'll let those events slide. Those events come nowhere close to being as nonsensical as the triple jump.
I don't know why our track & field forefathers decided that "How far can a person can jump after two consecutive leaps?", should be worthy of it's own competition. It's the most awkward looking event out of all the events. It makes zero sense. Why not a double jump? Why not a standing jump? Why not a vertical leap? Vertical leap would be a way better competition than the triple jump. The triple jump is ridiculous. I watched the finals today and the whole time I just thought about how stupid it was.
3-on-3 Basketball
Honestly I think 3x3 basketball might take the cake for dumbest event. And not just because Team USA's 3-on-3 teams are an embarrassment. It's a bad product. It's not entertaining. It's barely even a sport. But most importantly, the rules of qualifying for Olympic 3-on-3 is that the players must be ranked high enough nationally in the FIBA 3-on-3 rankings. In order to do that, they have to play in a certain amount of FIBA 3-on-3 sanctioned events. So you're only getting the players who are bad enough at basketball that they have the time to fuck around with FIBA 3-on-3 tournaments. If they want to start actually letting the best basketball players in, then I might change my tune. But the way it is now, it's all just a weird side show that proves nothing.
Breaking (i.e. Breakdancing)
Paris 2024 is the first Olympics that features "breaking" as an event. I don't know why they can't be normal and call it "breakdancing" like the rest of the world. Because that's what it is. But the official name of the event is "breaking".
Did anybody ask for this? Were breaking fans across the world knocking down the Olympic Committee's door, demanding their "sport" be included in the Olympics? How is it even judged? Breakdancing shouldn't be a competition at all. It an art. It's something people do on laid out cardboard boxes on the streets of New York City to make a little extra money.
Race Walking
The words "walk" and "race" should never go together. Walking is leisurely activity. It's something you do with you dog. The way people their bodies when they're race walking… nobody moves their body like that in real life. If you want to go faster, just run.
Honorable Mention: Metric System
I understand that the rest of the world uses the metric system, but NBC is broadcasting primarily to the United States. I don't want to know how many meters tall Bam Adebayo is.
