Sports such as surfing, rock climbing, skateboarding and break dancing are now official Olympic Sports. Paris showed that it "gives" space to new categories of sports, enriching the menu of the games, something it had already done in the distant 1900, in the second modern Olympic Games organized there.
Now if the above sports are making an impression on you, let's take a look at five of the strangest ones we've seen in the history of the Games.
Long jump and high jump with horse
Equestrian sports also hide an injustice, don't they? The horse does all the work and the rider gets the trophies and the glory. In Paris in 1900, then, we saw something completely original. In the equestrian competition we saw both the high jump and the long jump with a horse.
Pigeon shooting
Back in Paris in 1900 we saw perhaps the most embarrassing sport in the history of the Games. The object of the sport, as you might have guessed, was for an athlete to kill as many pigeons as possible. Contestants were eliminated if they failed to find a target twice in a row. The competition was won by the Belgian Leon de Lunden, who managed to kill 21 pigeons. At the end of the race, more than 300 pigeons had fallen to the ground dead. How scary.
Duel with pistols
This happened at the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm, but it wasn't as scary as it sounds, since the participants weren't actually shooting each other. Instead, participating athletes had to shoot dummies with targets painted on their chests.
Swimming 200 meters with obstacles
We return to Paris in 1900. Swimmers had to climb a series of obstacles or swim under others, in a sort of Olympic version of Total Wipeout. The Australian Fred Lane was the champion, while it is worth noting that the competition took place on the Seine.
Poodle haircut
Of course, there's only one place we could see this and that's Paris in 1900. This was, admittedly, a test event, meaning it didn't have full Olympic status. Mysteriously, it failed the organizers' test. There were 128 contestants who appeared in front of a crowd of 6.000 in the Bois De Boulogne park, where they had to clip as many poodles as they could in two hours. So many questions come to mind about this particular "sport" and, above all, why did they do it? However, Avril Lafoule was lucky, after she won the gold medal with a total of 17 clipped poodles.
Source: gazzetta.gr
