1. Of all the Olympic sports that have come and gone - and there have been more than you might think - I believe my favourite would have to be the event known as plunge for distance. A feature of the 1904 Games in St Louis, it required competitors to dive into a pool from a standing position and, while maintaining a posture of perfect rigidity, to float as far as they could for as long as they could without drawing breath.
2. I don't know whether the competitors took turns at this or went in all at once, but I would like to think the latter as it presents such an agreeable image of a pool full of inert bodies drifting about in a more or less random manner, gently bumping into the sides and each other. In any case, even by the extremely accommodating standards of the early Olympics, the sport was deemed too ridiculous to be sustainable and was discontinued at the next Games.
3. Also failing to last long in Olympic competitions were club swinging, croquet, rope climbing, tug of war, live pigeon shooting, motor-boat racing, two-handed javelin throw and the 100m swim for sailors, which featured at the first modern Games in Athens in 1896 and then was heard of no more. I mention all this because I have just been reading about the first days of the modern Olympics and it's hard not to be struck by the openness, the village-fête-like simplicity, of the Games then compared with now.
4. In those days, Olympics were small-scale affairs - Athens had barely 200 competitors, as against more than 10,000 at Sydney - and so easygoing that spectators could actually hope to take part. The entrants in the 1904 marathon, for instance, included two Zulu dancers who happened to be in St Louis on a cultural exchange and entered on a whim. Supervision was likewise a trifle casual. Michel Théato, the winner of the 1900 marathon in Paris, is reputed to have used his knowledge of the city's geography to introduce a number of useful shortcuts down back alleys and side lanes.
5. Even more enterprising was the American Fred Lorz, who completed the 1904 marathon looking uncannily fresh. It turned out that he had accepted a lift from a passing motorist, who had dropped him just outside the stadium after conveying him 11 miles. I think it is safe to say that we will not see those days again.
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