1) Pigeon racing – Paris, 1900
The success of the first modern Olympic Games in Athens in 1896 had many believing that the Greek capital should be the nascent movement’s permanent host. No doubt, many citizens whose cities have been left with a hefty deficit and an expensive white elephant or two wish it had been. But somehow failing to foresee things like terrorism in Munich, smog in Beijing, and menacing mosquitos in Rio, International Olympic Committee founder Baron Pierre de Coubertin argued that the Games were a gift worth sharing. He must have been envisaging the kind of goodwill evident in Tokyo (1964), Barcelona (1992) and Sydney (2000).
With De Coubertin proving persuasive, a decision was made to hold the 1900 Games in his home city of Paris. The French government, however, shunted De Coubertin into a minor administrative role and thus he could only watch on in despair as they took over and, apart from a few notable positives (women competed for the first time, and athletes from 31 countries, compared to 14 in Athens, took part), ballsed the whole thing up.
Paris’s problems stemmed from the fact the Games, spread across more than five months, were held at the same time as the rather more illustrious (at the time) World’s Fair. Due to a lackadaisical organisational approach – and a distinct lack of plastic orange cones and volunteer marshals in fluorescent Olympic livery – the Olympics and World’s Fair came to form a Venn diagram with many sports and activities falling into the subset. Were they Olympic sports or World’s Fair sideshows? As Olympic historian David Wallechinsky later wrote: “Many athletes died without ever knowing that they had participated in the Olympics.”
Accordingly, the demonstration sports at the 1900 Paris Games had the whiff and substance of fairy-floss about them: cannon firing, hot air ballooning, fishing, pigeon racing, fire fighting, kite flying and life-saving, among others. Unfortunately, details surrounding the running of these events, let alone a run-down of place-getters, have been swept under the flokati rug of time.
What has not been forgotten was the live pigeon shooting event held within the official Olympic shooting program. Competitors, who paid to take part, were introduced to a cage-full of pigeons and, upon their release, were given free reign until they missed two shots. Carnage ensued; over 300 birds were killed as spectators were showered with blood and feathers. As De Coubertin later observed of Paris 1900: “It’s a miracle the Olympic movement survived these Games.”
2) Cycle polo – London, 1908
Generally speaking, demonstration sports are included in an Olympics by the host nation as a way of introducing sports they are rather partial to, with an eye to pushing for their inclusion in future Olympics. As such, 17 demonstration sports have later become fully-fledged Olympic sports, such as basketball, volleyball, handball, badminton, tennis, judo, taekwondo and baseball (which has been dropped for Rio 2016).
The inclusion of cycle polo at the London Games of 1908, however, doesn’t seem to fit this modus operandi as it wasn’t until the late 1930s that the sport experienced the peak of its popularity in Great Britain (when there were some 1,000 registered players spread amongst 100 clubs and 170 teams). Moreover, cycle polo, unlike its equine version, polo, did not have as obvious a connection to the gentry and, I’m speculating, British Olympic Committee decision-makers. So it’s not clear just why cycle polo – invented by Irish writer and competitive cyclist Richard Mecredy in 1891 – was given the honour of an Olympic appearance.
It was though, and on the first day of the Games, hours after King Edward VII cut the proverbial ribbon, a demonstration cycle polo match was played at White City Stadium in west London. The combatants were the Irish Bicycle Polo Association and the Bund Deutscher Radfahrer (German Cycling Federation), the latter made up of athletes who were in London to compete as track cyclists and apparently didn’t seem to be at all concerned that a stray mallet to the knee could cost them a medal on the track. The records show that Ireland beat Germany 1-0. Clearly Ireland were still in form having defeated England 10-5 in Crystal Palace in the first cycle polo international seven years earlier.
At the time, cycle polo was a 6 v 6 game played on a grass pitch measuring in the order of 150m x 100m. Played over four quarters, or chukkas, it closely followed the rules of polo. These days, however, cycle polo has been superseded by bike polo, a 3 v 3 game played on hard courts. Embraced by hipsters it has, like vinyl, enjoyed a surge in popularity but for all that its Olympic days will surely remain in the past.
3) Korfball – Antwerp, 1920 and Amsterdam, 1928
If you had to imagine a sport created by a gulag of Guardian columnists, something like korfball would be the result. Adapted from a Swedish sport called ringbol, korfball – which resembles netball – emphasises the group over the individual and is designed for teams made up of four women and four men. As such, its rules, invented in 1902-03 by Dutch schoolteacher Nic Broekhuysen, look to eliminate any strength and speed benefits men generally have over women.
Played on a 40m x 20m court, korfball is non-contact, players are forbidden from running with, and dribbling, the ball, and players cannot shoot for the basket (a.k.a. the korf, a round, net-less basket suspended from a 3.5m pole situated a third of the way in from each backline) if a defensive player has taken up position in front of them (a defensive player of the same sex, that is – you are not allowed to defend someone of the opposite sex). In this way a player’s height is not as great an advantage in korfball as it is in netball or basketball.
A popular sport in the Netherlands and Belgium particularly, korfball came to the attention of De Coubertin in 1911 during a visit to Amsterdam when he was invited to a game between two local teams. After Antwerp was awarded the 1920 Olympic Games Dutch IOC member Baron van Tuyll van Serooskerken lobbied for korfball to be included as a demonstration sport and he wouldn’t take “no” for an answer.
So, on 22 August, two Dutch teams played a game of korfball in the Antwerp suburb of Kiel. According to a rather casual report of the game which the author, establishing his priorities early, begins with an observation that he sought to eat dinner before the game started as it would be too late to do so by the time it finished – the crowd was “fair” and even engaged in some “American ‘cheerleading’” which “did us a lot of good and even moved us for a moment”.
The game, however, was a let down. “We cannot be very enthusiastic about the play that was presented by the teams,” wrote S.A. Wilson in his report, archived at the Royal Netherlands Korfball Association. “Many times we have seen better play during demonstrations or other important matches. The slippery field was undoubtedly the reason for this detraction of the game. Fine jumpshots were impossible, and the fast play of this sport could not be shown.”
For all that disappointment, korfball made a second Olympic appearance in Amsterdam four years later.
4) Gliding – Berlin, 1936
Given the clouds of war were gathering, and given we’d discover that the numerous sports-gliding schools in Germany were used to circumvent the Versailles restrictions and train future Luftwaffe pilots, the cover photo used on a booklet designed to explain the demonstration sport of gliding at the Berlin Olympics has foreboding overtones: a “plane” in the air, its wings forbiddingly wide, while in the foreground three men appear to be fleeing – and without shirts on, such was their apparent haste to get away. It’s a touch North by Northwest.
A closer inspection, however, reveals that two of the men are holding what looks to be a rope but in fact is a bungee cord. For rather than the glider being towed into the air by a small plane it was launched from the ground by men using the elastic cord to propel the aircraft towards a drop. Still, that photo…
Before the 1930s, gliding was a popular civilian sport but, with the rise to power of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, its military applications came to the fore a few years before the staging of the Berlin Games and thus years before it was chosen, along with baseball, as a demonstration sport.
On 4 August at the Staaken Aerodrome near Berlin more than a dozen pilots from seven countries took part in the demonstration of gliding. Their efforts were overshadowed by the events of the previous day when, during practice, Austrian pilot Ignaz Stiefsohn was killed when his glider crashed.
Following the Berlin Games the IOC approved gliding as an official Olympic sport and it was due to make its debut at the 1940 Olympics. But by then, of course, the world was at war, the Luftwaffe were raining death from the skies, and the Olympics had been cancelled. Gliding was never invited back.
5) Australian rules football – Melbourne, 1956
As you’d expect, passionate fans of Australian rules football believe it to be the greatest game in the world. And it is … if the world can be reduced to four Australian states and one-and-a-half territories (in which live just under half of Australia’s population). In any case, for all the belief and passion held by the Aussie rules faithful, for all the certainty that they follow the one true sport, the game’s administrators seem reasonably content with their lot and aren’t overly aggressive proselytisers – at least, bearing in mind the crusades being waged in the heathen states of NSW and Queensland – outside of Australian shores.
I’d argue, then, that when Australian rules football was chosen to be a demonstration sport at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics the Victorians in charge weren’t really thinking it would somehow convince the rest of the world to stop what they were doing and take up Australia’s Indigenous game. No, it’s more like they simply wanted to display their local game, and fish for a few compliments, in the same way house-proud hosts grasp their guests by the elbows and lead them on a tour: “You’re going to love what we’ve done with the kitchen!” Modern professional sport may be drowning under the gush of marketing and promotions but these were different times.
As it happens, the demonstration game hosted at the MCG on the penultimate day of the Olympics was hardly going to get anyone’s blood pumping, let alone see them converting after a baptism in the Yarra. As professionals weren’t allowed, the game didn’t feature rival VFL clubs, which might at least have created some passion in the stands, if not on the field. Instead, a crowd of 36,000 (comprising the Duke of Edinburgh and an unknown number of other international visitors), saw a game between a composite team representing the Victorian Amateur Football Association and another from a combined Victorian Football League and Victorian Football Association.
Yes, as Melbourne Argus reporter Percy Taylor enthused, “They saw OUR football”, but what they saw was nothing to write home about. “If my guess is right,” he wrote, “they were not tremendously impressed. Let me hasten to say no one should be really surprised they gained that impression. Why? It was out of season, which is fatal. It was an exhibition, and, as such, lacked the fire that makes our game. And there was the absence of that partisan spirit, the life-blood of our game.”
For the record, the Victorian amateur team won in an upset, 12.9 to 8.7.
6) Roller hockey – Barcelona, 1992
Not to be confused with roller derby (the real or imagined versions), roller hockey is a version of hockey in which the participants wear roller skates (but not necessarily listen to Olivia Newton John songs with the wind blowing through their hair). Played on a hardcourt “rink” between two teams of five (one of whom is a goalkeeper), the game first recorded match was one played in 1878 at the Denmark Rink in Camberwell, London. That was some 15 years after the invention of the quad (four-wheeled) roller skate, and 120 or so years after Belgian Joseph Merlin invented the first roller skate by replacing the blade of an ice-skate with inline wheels.
For reasons unknown, roller hockey was embraced by Spain, for one, and in 1970 a Spanish national league (that still exists today) was established. And with the sport particularly popular in Catalonia the organising committee of the 1992 Barcelona Olympics took little convincing to include roller hockey as one of three demonstration sports (the others being Basque pelota and taekwondo). It can’t have hurt either that then IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch had played the game in his college days.
Twelve countries entered teams which were divided into two pools according to the results of the 1991 Rink Hockey World Championships (won by Portugal). In the end hosts Spain played Argentina in the final with the visitors winning 8-6 and securing the gold medal.
After Barcelona there was talk of roller hockey becoming a fully-fledged Olympic sport at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. It didn’t, and nor did it make another appearance as a demonstration sport. Following the 1992 Games the IOC decided to scrap the idea of demonstration sports.
