Wacky Sports That Were Once Olympic Events

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Paris wins the Olympics for having the worst ideas on record as they had so many once off never to be repeated events.

The Olympic Games has seen some bizarre and wacky sporting events through it's history which at the time weren't that strange. Some of the events or actually all of these events were scrapped after being featured once only so even then they were being shunned.

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Live Pigeon Shooting

Happened once at the 1900 Olympic Games in Paris where 6 pigeons were released 27 yards away from the competitor. If you missed two or more you were eliminated and the bids got lucky lol. Out of the 166 participants only 300 birds were killed which tells you this is way harder than clay pigeon shooting.

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Not exactly going to make a come back anytime soon as I am sure there would be some sort of outcry.

Horse Long Jump & High Jump

This was also at the Paris Olympics in 1900 and has never appeared again. These were some games as you had to have bene there I suppose to witness this stuff. In the High Jump they had 19 competitors from 5 nations with a winning height of 1.85m. There was a world record set in Chile back in 1949 with a leap of 2.47m and possibly will never be beaten as I don't think the sport is around anymore.

The Long Jump is quite disappointing as in your had you can see a horse galloping and jumping travelling quite far but that is not the case. The Paris Olympics was won with a jump of only 6.10m. Not great considering what humans can do with Mike Powell setting the world record at 8.95m.

I can see why both of these sports wouldn't get a look into today as having a horse break it's legs achieving a world record would be seen as barbaric. Even I would draw the line on this one, maybe not the pigeons but horses yes.

Powerboating

This featured at the 1908 Olympic Games in London even though the event was held in Southampton way off shore. 6 of the 9 races were cancelled due to bad weather and low visibility plus obviously very few spectators. This sounds like the locals trying to boost their medal counts as the event was scrapped and never appeared again.

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Team event yes but solo makes no sense as what is synchronized about 1 swimmer?

Solo Synchronized Swimming (1992)

This has to be one of the strangest out of a lot of sports the Olympics has seen. Not exactly a sport you could cock up as it was up to the swimmer to show they were in sinc with the music playing. Who comes up with this stuff as this is not made up and is genuine. Thankfully this also only featured once and was scrapped afterwards.

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Plunge For Distance

Another nutty sport featured at the 1908 Olympics one time only and I wonder why. The competitor had to dive into the pool from a standing start and glide without using arms or legs to try and travel the furthest underwater. The time was up after 60 seconds or if your head broke the surface of the water. They really did have some gripping events back then as this stopped due to lack of popularity.

200m Swimming Obstacle Race

Another event that featured one time only from our Paris Olympics in 1900. They really had a cracker as this event was held in the River Seine. The obstacles were a pole you had to climb over followed by a row of boats also to climb over and finally a row of boats you swam under. A bit boring considering this actually could be an interesting event if you made it more challenging. I do get where the organisers were coming from if you have some crazy events and fill them with locals you could pick up some extra medals. This event had 20 Frenchmen competing with only 4 making it to the finals. Two Brits came first and third sandwiching and Austrian who came second. The French came 7th,8th, 9th and 10th messing up their plans.

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Dueling Pistols

This was featured at the 1908 Olympics but never was part of the games even though some say it was. Just happened to have an event at the same time as the Olympics in London. The French (again) decided to show their new sport to try and gain popularity.

The competitors wore protective clothing and fired dueling pistols at each other using wax bullets. Definitely not a last man standing event and understandably never took off unless you count paintball as the equivalent sport today.

As you can see from the above list complied things have been rather crazy over the last century and a bit when it comes to Olympic Sports. There were others I could have included but these seemed to stand out on their own for some unknown reason.