Alternative Olympic Games

Many thanks to Beijing Olympics Fan for alerting us to this webpage of wonders on the Mental Floss website.

The sports/activities/antics [delete as required] depicted on this page, each with a demo video clip, beat diving, dressage, and most other Olympic sports hands down. Shame upon BOCOG for not selecting wife-carrying [if you really think this is a time-waster just take a look at the prize] as an alternative event to hurdle racing and underwater hockey surely beats synchronised swimming every day of the week. Some of the names are self-explanatory, such as underwater hockey but others take a little thinking about. Ga-Ga for instance isn’t something that happens to grannies and granddads but is a form of Dodgeball, played in an octagonal pit. And for all the tired and jaded baseball watchers out there pesapallo is just what’s needed to turn a rather repetitive mediocre activity into genuine entertainment. No more neat and tidy circuits of the diamond to score, instead the players run an almost random zig-zag route to make their points. It looks quite chaotic but apparently there are real rules [somewhere] and they are just as precise as those of the original game. Almost on a par with Extreme Ironing – now there’s real sport for real men [and women].