With the Winter Olympics being held this year and the Summer Olympics being held in two years time, if you were to look at the current cycle of Olympic hosts, there are two gaps:
2014 - Winter Olympics - Sochi
2015 - nil
2016 - Summer Olympics - Rio
2017 - nil
The obvious thing would be to fill in the gaps with the other seasons that are missing:
2018 - Winter Olympics - Pyeongchang
2019 - Spring Olympics - ???
2020 - Summer Olympics - Tokyo
2021 - Autumn Olympics - ???
Thus we'd arrive at the novel idea of introducing the Spring Olympics and Autumn Olympics. With two new sets of Olympic Games, there'd have to be a whole suite of new sports to go with them.
For the Spring Olympics you could for instance host:
- Lawnmowing - both Speed and Freestyle
- Cat Herding
- Four Square (Handball)
- Mini Golf
- Chasey (Tiggy, Tag, British Bulldog)
- Wall Ball
- 100m Slip And Slide
- Castell (Human Tower)
- Aunt Sally
- Topiary - better with Japanese Box
- Cheese Rolling - this so needs to be an Olympic event.
- Brandy
- Billy-Cart Racing
There's twelve sports for a start.
Of course for the Autumn Olympics, there would also need to be season specific sports:
- Leaf Raking - also jumping in piles of leaves
- Hide & Seek - confined to an area the size of the Olympic Village
- Conkers - in various "er" classes, one-er, five-er, nine-er etc.
- Queueing - both the 10m and 4x25m events, both with and without umbrella and suitcase
- Pumpkin Carving
- Tug Of War - preferably the teams should be either side of a muddy ditch.
- Royal Shrovetide Football - also the same area as Hide & Seek
- Rock-Paper-Scissors
- Grass Skiing
- Letterbox Baseball
- Skully
- Le Parkour - also Freerunning
- Welly Wanging (Gumboot throwing) - also Shoefiti and "How Do You Like Your Eggs?"
Sports for inclusion in the Spring Olympics and Autumn Olympics would need to be not so much athletic as they are daft. Games like Go, Chess, MahJohng, Shogi, Monopoly, Risk, Paintball, Capture the Flag, Dodgeball, Rollerball, Potato Sweep, Jeu De Paume, Elimination Prisonball, Korfball, Cycle Polo, etc. should all be up for inclusion.
I think that it should also be incumbent on the IOC to award the Spring and Autumn Olympics to nations who have never hosted anything before and that the IOC should pay for the running of them. The fields for a sport like Hide & Seek or Royal Shrovetide Football for instance, don't need to be flash; in fact it's better if they aren't.
Who wouldn't like to the the Spring Olympics of 2019 in a place like Cotonou? Or the 2021 Autumn Olympics in Bishkek? The Olympic Motto of Citius, Altius, Fortius is all very well but what of Amicis, Felicior, Simul? (Friendship, Happiness, Togetherness)
The Olympic Creed states that:
The most important thing in the Olympic Games is not to win but to take part, just as the most important thing in life is not the triumph, but the struggle. The essential thing is not to have conquered, but to have fought well.
Fighting is one thing, it's quite another to give back; it's not like the IOC isn't already awash with cash for essentially doing diddly-squat.
Besides which, I really want to see Cheese Rolling at the 2025 Olympics in Riga.
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