Pistol dueling and other former stupid Olympic events

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Pistol dueling and other former stupid Olympic events

While most of the sports in today’s summer and winter Olympics seem to fit the bill, around the early 1900s when the modern Olympics started, it took a while for people to realize what kinds of events would make for good international competition.

Some sports, like pistol dueling, just fell out of favor, while others such as distance plunging— diving into the water and seeing how far you can float without moving a muscle— don’t really seem like they should have ever made the cut.

Time Magazine put together a list of nine Olympic events from summer Olympics gone by, which you can see here.

Some they didn’t include form the first couple of Olympics weren’t even sports at all, by any stretch of the imagination, but organizers felt they fit the classical spirit of the games. Literature, poetry, sculpture and city planning were all such events.