Rubbish sports and the Olympics

Forgive me, reader, if you’ve reached Olympic saturation point over the summer. No doubt I would have done so long ago, had I not spent a large part of those two weeks in a lecture theatre in The Netherlands. Utrecht train station, I excitedly discovered, had a large screen TV showing the Games. I stationed myself in front of the screen, keen to catch up on all the action…

But wait. Horses? Music? Horses dancing to music? “Is this some kind of hoax?” I asked the lady who was sat next to me. However she reassured me that this was indeed “dressage“, an Olympic sport. Perplexed, I continued watching. Dressage undoubtedly requires a certain amount of skill (from both rider and horse), but is no spectator sport. Each act looked the same to me (yet bewilderingly collected different scores). And each rider looked the same on horseback (indeed it was only after a while that I noticed that some were male and some were female).

The event that followed was something called “BMX” which, I should explain to those who have yet to have the dubious pleasure of watching it, involves riding very small bikes over artificial hills. Despite it being easy enough to work out who is winning, there is still not much that BMX has to offer to the non-bloodthirsty spectator; it is fairly common for only a handful of the competitors to complete the race, the rest suffering painful injury on the way.

Call me old fashioned, but I yearned for a good old running or jumping contest. However, my prayers went unanswered, as we migrated from BMX to women’s boxing. A British lady was in the final and so patriotism dictated that I willed her to punch her opponent in the face as hard as possible. Extraordinary. I don’t call that sport.

So what sport should be in the Olympics instead? Certainly there are many worthy contenders, but the one that springs to my mind is squash. Although excluded now and in 2016, it surely has more appeal to both the player and the spectator. The average person is far more likely to have tried squash than dancing on a horse or punching someone in the face. They are also more likely to infer who is winning and what constitutes good play. Furthermore squash is a game of speed, grace and tactics; a game that depends on the skill of the player and not of an animal also.

The Olympics are inspiring and free advertisements for lots of different sports. What a pity that it was sports like dressage, BMX and boxing, and not others like squash, that were advertised this time around.