While it’s fair to say recent decades have seen a fairly stable core of Olympic sports, a surprising number of now mainstay sports were pre-figured by related games which in a slightly different world could have come to be the canon, default version of those games.
Whether as fully competitive demonstration sports or unofficial exhibitions, the annals of one-off events are a history of the paths not taken by the Olympic movement through the almost infinite variety of world sport. In some cases, it may be that the choices made helped set the tone for what’s considered the definitive version of some sports.
Take handball for example. The current indoor game dominated by Europeans used to be a winter version of an outdoor field handball, more closely resembling soccer, and was played in the 1936 Berlin games, decades before the indoor version was introduced at Munich in 1972. These days, the indoor variety is the standard.
Golf, meanwhile, was preceded by both croquet and roque as candidates to be the Olympic precision stick and ball sport.
Then for faster stick and ball sports, while the dominant form these days is field hockey, which debuted at London 1908, it was in fact predated by two other near cousins with non-British origins.
Both lacrosse and hurling featured in St Louis 1904. Lacrosse, is returning in 2028, but it remains to be seen whether the Haudenosaunee Nation will be able to compete under their own flag given IOC rules.
Game forms associated with more low profile nations abounded. There’s the Dutch korfball, which appeared in 1928 before its famous cousin basketball gained official entry, and Finland’s Pesäpallo appeared at Helsinki before Baseball became a regularised part of the program.
Racquet sports have had a particularly quirky history. Tennis is a foundation sport but beyond it rackets, basque pelota and jeu de paume all made early entries while squash, perhaps now the most prominent non-tennis game in the family, has only gained entry for the first time in Los Angeles 2028.
Combat sports in the modern Olympics include eastern martial arts judo and taekwondo, but long before them a more Eurocentric Olympic movement saw the French kickboxing martial art savate get a run at the second Paris games.
And of course we can remember rugby. Before the current high paced version of Rugby 8s the slower, more stagnant 15-a-side version featured in early Olympics.
This is a joke for all those paying attention still.
Event of the day
Table Tennis – mixed doubles
Come on, admit it. Table tennis is pretty fun. Have a whack of the bats on the small court.
Every holidays tons of people overestimate their ability and try to smash the ball into the far corner and end up missing dramatically.
Table tennis is a test to see who is truly confident in their athletic abilities, and those who might know they are actually good at it.
Take NBA superstar Anthony Edwards. He is certain he can win at least a point against the US women’s team. They – being experts – are pretty sure he can’t.
HPN has firmly picked which side they are backing here.
The mixed doubles final will be fought out against the North Korean pairing of Kim and Ri and the favoured Chinese pairing of Sun and Wang. North Korea will be going for their first ever gold medal in Table Tennis, while China will be going for their 33rd.
If that doesn’t seem high it’s worth considering there have been only 37 golds handed out so far in the sport at the Olympics.
Alternative medal tally – the discontinued sports
Discontinued events contribute to official medal tallies but demonstrations and exhibitions do not. Nonetheless, a medal tally from all available records of these events shows us something about who ran the earlier Olympic movement.
It’s no surprise to find that the front runner nation in the tally of medals awarded is Great Britain with the United States and France behind them. All were prolific in hosting the early Olympics and all saw plenty of experimentation with local events.
The sum of “Mixed team” wins sits fifth given the ad hoc nature of early Olympic Games, and Australasia’s walkover rugby union gold over a British club side in St Louis puts the combined team ahead of Australia itself.