Thursday, August 16, 2012

Opposites Attract (Viewership)

The opposite of the high jump is limbo but the Catholic Church got rid of Limbo and is using its influence with the IOC to prevent limbo from becoming an Olympic sport, which is foutaise.



So is the fact that they give out medals for diving with the smallest splash but belly-flops have not even cracked the Olympics as a demonstration sport yet. It's easy: you just put a bunch of containers around a small pool that all feed into a centralized graduated cylinder underneath that measures the volume of water displaced and whoever transported the most water from the pool to the cylinder wins. The pool would have to be small and there would be 5 attempts per competitor with each attempt counting towards their cumulative volume. To succeed would require a mix of technique and mass. You could even have separate events for the 5m platform and the 1m springboard (since five belly-flops from the 10m platform and the 3m springboard might raise concerns about internal bleeding).

Imagine the excitement as the water trickles down and collects upwards towards the current leader's position after each dive while on the other half of the split screen is a slow-motion replay of the exaggerated ripples of the flopper's torso and the pool's waves, first seen from above and them from the side!

(Actually, now that I think about it, the sport of flopping already exists at the Olympics, they just call it "Men's Basketball.")

Most Olympic sports don't have a viable opposite, e.g. you it's not feasible to have a competition to see who can run the slowest (instead of the fastest) or who can drown (instead of swim). We must take advantage of those few opportunities for symmetry that exist.

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