Watching snowboarders go sailing almost a football field’s length into the air or skeleton riders shoot face first down a mountain at speeds approaching 90 mph, it’s easy to question whether or not these athletes are, in fact, out of their minds. But as insane as some of the events seem, there are some sports from the movies that are so crazed that we’ll probably never get to see them show up in the Olympics.
DEATH RACING from DEATH RACE 2000
While auto racing was introduced as an exhibition sport at the 1900 Olympics, it never made the cut as an official event because in many people’s eyes the outcome of a car race relies on the quality of the equipment rather than the physical capabilities of the driver. But in Death Racing, in which points are scored by how many pedestrians you can mow down with your vehicle, I’d imagine steering ability probably matters much more than speed. If you think of it as Luge with a body count, it might just work. It’d probably be hard to sell tickets to spectators, though, so I doubt we’ll ever see this one get added.
ROLLERBALL from ROLLERBALL
C’mon, a mish-mash of roller derby, motocross, basketball, and ultimate fighting, what more could you ask for? It was even designed to be an international competition. Of course, the sport’s anti-corporate undertones probably wouldn’t sit well with the sponsors, so Rollerball is probably out. After all, we can’t have everybody rising up against their McNugget overlords, can we?
GYMKATA from GYMKATA
Gymnastics is one of the biggest television draws for the Olympics, so you’d think the organizers would jump at the chance to add another related event to the proceedings. Really, Gymkata is just the regular men’s competition with the extra added attraction of the athletes punching and kicking anyone who gets too close to the apparatuses. I bet it would probably prove so popular that it could spawn a bunch of spin-offs like Downhill Boxing, Full Contact Curling, or maybe even Skate-Fu. Unfortunately, the judging in gymnastics is already too subjective, so who would really want to watch an event where the contestants could get penalized for not breaking someone’s nose artistically enough?
ROBOT BOXING from STAR ODYSSEY
With Google quickly on its way to becoming SkyNet, this one seems like a no-brainer. Artificial intelligences are bound to want to get in on the sports action at some point, and who doesn’t feel like punching a machine in the face whenever the ATM is down or that talking gas pump tries to sell you some engine cleaner for the millionth time? Still, until they come up with a program that makes a robot get tired and want to hang all over his opponent in the middle of the ring like a drunken prom date, this one probably isn’t going to be allowed.
JUGGING from THE BLOOD OF HEROES
The object in Jugging is simple. Someone on your team has to get a dog skull across the opposing team’s goal line without sustaining serious bodily harm from the defenders wielding clubs, pipes, and spiked chains. Pretty cool, huh? But what really makes Jugging stand out from some of the other games in this list is that it actually became a real world sport a while back after a group of Germans started their very own Jugging league. Theoretically, that means Jugging is the one sport on this list that has the potential to become an Olympic event some day. Considering the high rate of broken limbs and fractured skulls involved in Jugging, however, I just don’t see that happening any time soon.
Oh well, maybe the movies will come up with a sport we can actually add to the Olympics one day. As long as whatever it turns out to be follows the advice of the Catechism and “rejects a neo-pagan notion that tends to promote the cult of the body, to sacrifice everything for its sake, to idolize physical perfection and success at sports”, it should be fine. Otherwise, “by its selective preference of the strong over the weak, such a conception can lead to the perversion of human relationships.” And we don’t won’t that, do we?
Still, you’ve gotta admit, Skate-Fu sounds pretty cool.
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