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One for the London Olympics?

February 14th, 2008 · Posted by Skuds in Life · No Comments · Life

My immediate reaction to this story was, obviously, amusement – with a bit of bemusement thrown in for good measure – but after taking a moment to think about it I reckon it all makes sense and ought to qualify as a serious sport.

Many, if not most, of the oldest traditional sporting disciplines have their roots in skills needed for survival or advantage in society.  The very oldest (running, throwing stuff and jumping) were ways to improve skills needed for hunting and warfare in primitive societies and to help establish some sort of pecking order in the tribes.  Sport had an intricate and symbiotic relationship with the most vital of life skills back then.

Nowadays the ability to run faster, jump higher, ride a horse better or throw a spear further don’t have a lot of relevance to everyday life – but untangling ethernet cables could give you an edge in the workplace so why not?

We could also lobby to have touch typing included as an olympic discipline.  It might give us a chance of more medals too as it can be done sitting down and we all know that Team GB gets most of its medals from sitting down in rowing boats, on horses, on bicycles or in sailing boats.  Its a bit of an anomaly that we don’t always snag a medal in the bobsleigh.

Boxing, javelin, discus, wrestling all have their roots in improving the skills required for combat. Now that weapons technology has moved on the equivalent sport would involve sitting at a console full of telemetry data and waggling a joystick, perhaps while remote-controlled tanks or UAVs battle it out by proxy.

Football can stay of course.  One attribute or skill that has not changed over the centuries is the ability to work as part of a team, at least thats what all the employment gurus keep telling us.  Otherwise we should be looking at ways to come up with point-scoring systems which would let us make sports out of queueing,  getting out of side streets into a busy main roads, staying awake through meetings, finding a specific track on an iPod… there must be dozens of new hi-tech sports we could invent.  Maybe one day we will be sitting down to watch the heats of the Olympic podcasting event, or see hackers dress up in red jackets on a Sunday to go hunting viruses.

Seriously though. I wonder if the fact that many sports no longer have the relationship to basic survival skills that they once did makes them purer in some way – more idealised.

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