With 302 total events at the London 2012 Olympics, there are a whole host of different athletes competing in their various disciples, training their body day and night for four years to excel. However, through the years the number of sports available for competition have always varied. Here’s a very interesting list of sports that were discontinued from the olympics.
1. Baseball: Baseball was removed from the 2012 London Olympics, in a very surprising vote by the international Olympic committee. It turned away 300 athletes from 16 different countries.
2. Tug of War: A sport has roots to the past, with many mysterious origins. It is thought to have been practiced in Egypt, India, Greece and Cambodia all the way back to 12 century A.D. From 1900-1920, tug of war was an Olympic sport with the United States winning all three medals.
3. Glima: Iceland’s national sport, a form of wrestling where the goal is to force your opponent to touch the ground between the elbow and knee. Glima only made one appearance in the Stockholm Olympics.
4. Rope Climbing: The goal of the sport was to obviously reach the top, but while looking good when you’re at it. The rope length was 25 feet, however in the 1896 Olympics, the rope was 46 feet (no one reached the top).
5. Ballooning: The 1900 summer games in Paris had many traditional French sports such as hot air ballooning. The sport was discontinued due to the obvious lack of athletic ability required to operate the balloon.
6. From the French 1900 Olympics, two sports survived to see another day: Croquet and Roque. However, they were both discontinued due to lack of interest.
In the history of the Olympics, even though some sports were lacking athletic ability or public interest, a common motif is that the people who took part in them did it with a passion, and to them these sports are always worth playing.
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