Nina In New York: Potential New Olympic Sport Games Are So Sports! And So Can I!
A lighthearted look at news, events, culture and everyday life in New York. The opinions expressed are solely those of the writer.
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By Nina Pajak
Good news sports fans! The 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo are shaping up to be slightly more full of sports!
Eight sports have been selected to remain in the running for inclusion in the games. They include baseball and softball, which are apparently already ex-Olympic categories. Then also: squash, karate, surfing, sport climbing, roller sports (?), wushu (??), and bowling (?????). That's right. Bowling. And I honestly hope it makes the cut, if for nothing else than having the image of a bunch of guys (and girls!) with beer paunches and clown shoes and short-sleeved button down shirts marching in the opening processional alongside the Russian men's gymnastics team. The movie writes itself, really. The Big Lebowski 2: The Dude Goes For Gold.
Anyway, while I'll be happy to have some new events to cut into the 168 hours of continuous beach volleyball coverage, I don't actually care very much about any of this. I'm obviously not a great watcher of sports and I understand that makes me lesser in the eyes of some. I accept it. So I almost dismissed this story as being fully out of my purview, until I scanned the list of some of the sports who were rejected from the list of applicants. They are:
"...air sports, American football, bowls, bridge, chess, dance sport, floorball, flying disc, korfball, netball, orienteering, polo, racquetball, sumo, tug of war, underwater sports, waterski and wakeboard."
This is my new favorite list of silly things. It reads like it's right out of a script from The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, a show about a girl trying to pass as a normal Manhattanite after spending her formative years trapped in a bomb shelter. I don't even want to know what most of these sports actually are, lest the explanation ruins the magic for me. I mean, how can dance sport get better? Or floorball? Or flying disc!
Given that we're just making things up now and we seem to be oddly back on my turf, I'd like to submit my own list of sports for consideration.
- Faceball
- Competitive selfie posting
- Ballball
- Water mime
- Airball
- Air guitar
- Stickball
- Sportball
- Ball sport
- Freeze tag
- Non-ball sport
- Knee sport
- Sport sport
- Leaping
- Old Maid
- Breakdancing (would actually be so cool)
- Riverdance
- Physical comedy (improvisational)
- Flurgdisc
- Plate spinning
- Shell game (also known as hustle sport)
- Fork sport (formerly Competitive Spaghetti Twirling)
- Twirling (just actual twirling)
- Belching (totally not what it sounds like; it involves a ball and physics and jet propulsion or something)
2024, here we come.
Nina Pajak is a writer living with her husband, daughter and dog in Queens. Connect with Nina on Twitter!
