Glen Humphries thinks it's high time some Olympic events were shown the door. Do you agree with his choices?
In recent years, the Olympics has been accompanied by the belief that there are just too many sports.
Occasionally they drop one, but foolishly add another sport for the next Games. For instance, Beijing is the last time women's softball will be an Olympic sport. But rather than just run with less sports for London in 2012, they've gone and added skateboarding.
Skateboarding? Was the IOC desperately trying to look cool?
It is admittedly hard to axe sports because you'll always upset someone. I'm sure there were a few unhappy people when tug of war was dropped from the 1924 Games after being an Olympic sport for 20 years.
But you just have to bite the bullet and, rather than culling sports at random, there needs to be a system to it. Some sort of benchmark that says, "if you don't meet this criteria, you're gone, sunshine".
I hereby suggest that criteria be as follows: any sport that relies on judges to decide the outcome should be shown the door.
Whoever wins and loses an event should be immediately apparent by the fact they scored the most goals, jumped higher, threw something further, finished the race the fastest or any other measure that is impartial and obvious.
Winning and losing should not be dependent on someone's opinion of how you performed. As previous Olympics have shown, judges can be bought off. You can't bribe a scoreboard or a stopwatch.
Of course, this criteria is personally beneficial as it gets rid of sports I've never cared much about.
For starters, it gets rid of synchronised swimming, something which I don't think will bother too many people. It also gets rid of trampolining, which you probably didn't even know was an Olympic sport but ridiculously enough, it is. Really, if a backyard activity like trampolining is in the Games, then how long will it be before the IOC decide to add Totem Tennis. Or maybe even hide and seek.
Gone too is dressage - which is really just pet tricks on a bigger scale. You don't get a gold medal for teaching your dog to heel and nor should you get one for teaching your horse to do the same.
In my world, all the diving events are history. The regular diving was bad enough but sychronised diving pushed things too far. In fact, sychronised ANYTHING is pushing things too far. Boxing relies on judges, so that's out as well. At least until they work out how to attach fighters to an electronic scoring system like they have in fencing.
Which brings me to the most contentious axing of them all - the gymnastics. The pommel horse, the rings, the uneven bars, the floor exercises - that lame thing where some girl in a leotard runs around waving a ribbon - it's all decided by judges so it all goes. Sure it's controversial because so many people like gymnastics but, like I said at the beginning, when it comes to culling sports there will inevitably be some very unhappy people.
Look at it this way - we don't win medals in gymnastics anyway.
There are a few questionable sports that sneak in under this criteria. Walking, for instance. That's such a silly sport - it's not walking anyway, it's people trying to get as close as they can to running without actually running.
Then there's table tennis, which never fails to make me snigger when I see it on TV during the Olympics coverage. Ping pong isn't a sport, it's a pastime. But, like walking, there aren't any judges deciding who wins and who loses, so it can stay.
For the time being.
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