The pigeons are safe in Sochi!

Fule for Thought

 

The Walking Dead is back on tonight, and I’m actually looking forward to it. After watching a lot of figure skating in the Olympics, I’m really ready for zombies! I really should have done some Walking Dead training, because you shouldn’t go in cold to an episode … you have to be prepared! So, at our house, we’re trying to watch a couple of episodes, just to loosen up.     

As I mentioned, the 2014 Winter Olympics are now on. By now, you may have gotten used to the time difference, and maybe you’ve stayed up into the wee hours to watch. I read somewhere that the Winter Olympics have just over 80 sports, while the summer ones have over 200. I guess that also means that less countries participate in the Winter Games. I don’t blame them though, because if you’re a Winter Olympic athlete, you’ve got to like being cold … a lot! All that training in the cold, so you can then compete bundled up in the cold has got to be depressing. With this winters amount of snow in Strathmore, maybe we should push for shoveling snow to become an official sport. You could measure the distance the snow is thrown, or the speed of getting your driveway totally shoveled. Heck, maybe you could add judges, music, and costumes!

It’s funny how the Winter Olympics can lull you into watching with kind of a glazed look on your face. I mean, before I knew it, on Saturday night, my father-in-law and I were watching figure skating …  figure skating on a Saturday night. I suddenly wondered if there was a testosterone patch I could quickly buy! I mean when you and your father-in-law are talking about costumes, make-up, and the music selections, things have definitely changed!

I think you can sum up many of the various Winter Olympic sports as having to do with falling. I mean, think about it … you either fall, which docks you points, you stop a fall, which costs you time, distance, or points, or you don’t ever fall, and you have success! Ski jumping, speed and figure skating, the luge and bobsleigh (crashes), downhill skiing, freestyle skiing, and snowboard, all have falling as a big part of their results. So, if I were a Winter Olympic athlete, I’d really focus on not falling! Now, if you could find a way to help the competition to fall, even better! Could you imagine if you were allowed to “take out” a curler during his slide! That would totally change the game! The comedian Jerry Seinfeld, mentioned the biathlon as a strange sport, because you’re racing others, but stopping to shoot at a target. He felt if he was there, it’d be tempting to just pick off the skier who was ahead of him.

I started thinking about how biathlon was a strange sport, so I looked up obsolete sports from the Olympics. Here’s a fun fact, in the 1900 Summer Olympics, live pigeon shooting was a sport! In those games, over 300 pigeons were shot … I wonder if any of them got medals! The eventual gold medal went to a guy from Belgium, who had 21 kills! They dropped this sport after these games, and pigeons everywhere had sighs of relief.

Tug-of-War was also a summer sport in the early 1900s. Yes, that old playground activity that got banned from a lot of schools was once in the Olympics. In fact the London police won gold in the 1908 Olympics. I wonder what training the bobbies did to become gold medalists … maybe pulling drunks out of pubs? Another Summer Olympic sport was the “famous” 200 metre underwater race. 

Can you imagine the excitement of the crowd watching the surface of the water, while the racers were below it!

The 1932 Winter Olympics featured dog sled racing as a sport. That would be my kind of sport, because the dogs would be the ones having to actually train! The guy in charge of the team, has to know five whole commands: “mush” to go, “gee’ to turn right, “haw” for left, “easy” to slow down, and “whoa” to stop. Wow, the dogs would have to run to exhaustion, while the musher could have a beer, and call out a few words! In 1928, “Skijoring” was also an Olympic sport. Now this one was strange, as it involved skiing behind horses! Maybe, it had the added challenge of dodging the horse crap … like an obstacle course! I wonder if the medal presentation had something for trigger, too!

I hope you enjoy the games, and here’s hoping Canada wins a lot of medals. Then, you can get ready for the 2018 Games in South Korea, and this time, they’re 16 hours ahead of us, so watching will be a little easier!

 

(“Fule for Thought” is a slice of life humourous column that appears in the Strathmore Times, written by long-time resident, town councillor, high school teacher, coach, husband and father of two – Pat Fule. If you would like to get in touch with Pat, you can send him an e-mail at Pat.fule@shaw.ca)