Nothing like wall-to-wall coverage of the world's best athletes doing things that would make Isaac Newton roll in his grave, all while Celine belts out My Heart Will Go On (I assume ... she was singing it in French) to make you feel really good about where you're at athletically.
It might shock you to learn that even though I look a bit like a Yukon Gold (the whitest and starchiest of the potatoes), beneath this starchy exterior, is absolutely not the rippling pectorals of a bloke secretly moonlighting as a top-level sportsman. Try to contain your surprise, but it's potatoes all the way down.
And when you've got the physique of a root vegetable and the general coordination of a vegetable that has been recently mashed, you're thankful that the Olympics only come around every four years. It can be, to put it mildly, a discouraging time.
Of course, I'm not trying to take anything away from the Greek gods who descend from Olympus every now and then to do something absurd like a triple-dipple-upside-dripple-ultimate-87-degree-backflip with a cherry on top in mid-air while also posting a flawless score on Wordle.
On the contrary, I think their feats are both death-defying and awesome and perhaps if I didn't like food, sex, wine and television so much and instead dedicated my life to going really, really fast and jumping high, I too could be one of those godly specimens.
The problem, to my mind, is that these sports just look really hard to do. The beach volleyball is on in the office as I write this, and all I can think of is how much easier the whole caper would be if that big net weren't in the way. Surely, someone in Paris could afford a regulation floor while we're at it (perhaps they spent all their pocket money de-pooping the Seine ... but let's not mention Le War!). And if everyone just calmed down a bit and stopped whacking the ball about, I'm sure we could figure out a system of pulleys and teamwork to get it from one end to the other with minimal fuss. If we really thought about it, we could probably get some shades up and sit down while we're doing it.
"But, surely," I hear my people cry, "There must be a sport out there that we mere mortals could have at least a reasonable crack at?" Well, glad you asked because I did some Googling when I should have been doing real work, and here are all the sports in which I am reasonably confident I could at least post a time, if not make the actual podium.
'Notable plunger'
I'm not joking; I am supremely confident that I could actually win the plunge for distance. Plunging was listed as one of the more niche sports in the 1904 Olympics held in Missouri. William P Dickey has the only Olympic gold medal in the sport (because the Olympics people apparently wised up after the first one and never allowed it back) for posting a distance of 62 feet and six inches. That's about 19 metres in the new money.
The rules are pretty straightforward. You start by "preparing to plunge", which, according to the instruction illustrations, means standing by the edge of the pool in your finest togs. You then "plunge" (i.e. jump in), head-first, or feet-first is apparently fine. And then you float around for a bit, ideally drifting as far as you can, before your head comes up out of the water, at which time an official quickly measures how far you got, and if it's more than 19 metres and five centimetres, guess what - you're an Olympian, Harry!
In the interest of transparency, I will say that critics took issue with plunging even in its heyday because it's, you know, "not a real sport" or whatever.
One naysayer reckoned it was "not an athletic event at all" and that it exclusively favoured "stylishly-stout" chaps who "fall in the water more or less successfully and depend upon inertia to get their points for them". That's according to the 1922 book Swimming and Diving (presumably subtitled: "and other sports that I don't want anyone to have any fun at") by Gerald "I hate everything good" Barnes.
Fastest pigeon doesn't get shot
Not in the mood for a dip? Look, I can't blame you. Given that the swimming water in Paris is mostly E. coli that's been slightly dampened by whatever space is left in the Seine for the water (allegedly), perhaps we should try getting our gold medal on dry land. And just for good measure, we'll use an animal to help us get it.
Live pigeon racing was an exhibition sport at the 1900 Olympics in Paris. (I know! Finally, a real sport). Just one slight catch: the same Olympics also included a pigeon shooting event, where competitors blasted as many live birds as possible out of the sky.
Again, I jest you not.
Unsurprisingly, the animal rights people weren't big fans of a sport that killed about 400 birds, and live animal shooting events never took off. And fair point, too, but notwithstanding my general pacifism, I'm fairly sure that, even in my unathletic prime, I could pass at least a few actual athletes on the track if the starting pistol was loaded. Just saying.
We didn't start the fire
While we're on the 1900 Paris Olympics, though, which by all accounts was an absolute trip, a few sources mention that Les Looney Toons Olympique of yesteryear also included firefighting as an exhibition sport that year in a move that I can only assume was just to see how far they could push their luck.
There's not much to report on this one.
The rules are written en francais (helpful), but roughly translate to describing a scenario in which a fire has broken out on the third floor of a six-storey building, and the aim of the game is to reach the people on floors five and six while performing (and excuse my French) "rescue and extinction".
Can't imagine why that didn't catch on.
