Tue 21 Feb 2006 @23:11
I’ve been watching some of the Curling in the Winter Olympics. I’m not sure why, but it seems that both the Men’s and Women’s teams for USA got an exceptional amount of coverage this time. Or maybe I just never noticed before…. I can’t say I find it really exciting, but the finesse they can put on a 40 pound stone is intriguing. It makes me wonder though, what is the difference between a game and a sport? And what are the requirements to be an Olympic sport?
So I looked on the “Official Website of the Olympic Movement” (kinda makes me wonder if there is an Official Turd of the Olympic Movement) and in their FAQs I learned that some of the requirements are:
To be included in the programme of the Olympic Games, an
Olympic sport must conform to the following criteria:
- 1.1 only sports widely practised by men in at least seventyfive countries and on four continents, and by women in at least forty countries and on three continents, may be included in the programme of the Games of the Olympiad;
- 1.2 only sports widely practised in at least twenty-five countries and on three continents may be included in the programme of the Olympic Winter Games;
- 1.3 only sports that adopt and implement the World Anti-Doping Code can be included and remain in the programme of the Olympic Games;
and
4 Criteria for Admission of Sports, Disciplines and Events:
- 4.1 To be included in the programme of the Olympic Games any sport, discipline or event must satisfy the conditions specified by this rule.
- 4.2 Sports, disciplines or events in which performance depends essentially on mechanical propulsion are not acceptable.
Anyway, I was watching Curling and wondering, “Is bowling an Olympic sport? Skittles? Tiddly-winks? Bocce ball?” Hmmm. Bocce and Curling seem to have a lot of similarities. (Except for the differences like indoor/outdoor, winter/summer, flat stones/round balls, size of target, number of players, etc. they’re exactly the same!) So I looked up the World Bocce League and found
Bocce has also become a tournament sport. Tournaments are held weekly, some carrying large cash awards for their winners. Bocce is now a part of the World Corporate Games, is an event in the Special Olympics, and is being proposed to be in the Olympics.
Apparently I’m a peripheral visionary. I can see the future, just way off to the side….
Technorati tags: Enough to Curl Your Heir~blog~personal~otoh
February 22nd, 2006 at 05:44
Cheerfully ganked from Chuck Shepard’s “News of the Strange” this week:
Dave “The Dragon” Lockwood and his tournament-tested sons, Max, 16, Jon, 13, and Ben, 10, of Silver Spring, Md., might become to competitive tiddlywinks what the Manning family of quarterbacks is to football, according to a January Washington Post story. Dave was previously ranked No. 1 in the English Tiddlywinks Association (and is currently No. 8, with Max No. 52). “Tiddlywinks doesn’t sound very serious,” said Max, but “(t)here’s so much strategy.” For the uninformed: You mash a “squidger” down on a “wink” to propel it either into the “pot” or to “squop” it onto an opponent’s wink to temporarily disable it. Dave said he plans to get Britain’s Prince Philip, a winker, to suggest tiddlywinks as a demonstration “sport” at London’s 2012 Summer Olympics.
Who knew squopping into a pot could be potentially Olympic?