How we view the Olympics, the older we get

Remembering when I was a kid and when they had the Olympics on, everything that did matter to my family was to see our country wave the flag in the finals and get that gold medal, but today it seems like it is not about which nation that win, more likely who plays best. 

Top three things that we were always watching at home was:

 

 1.       Handball- Because Sweden is pretty good at it; unfortunately they only got Silver this year. 

 

 2.       Table Tennis- Believe it or not but Sweden used to be the champions in Table Tennis and you guys though that only Asians were good at it. 

  3 .       Wrestling- A sport that is not practice a lot here in Sweden but fortunately brings home many medals. 

These sports used to be the main events and everyone stayed up to watch these games cheering for their nation to win. But today we have our nation in almost every sport and the true feeling of the Olympics is lost. 

I believe that a country should only send a team to a sport if they think that the team could qualify to be top 5 in the sport if not it would be a waste of money and time. Sometimes you see runners that end up last has an extreme difference from the one whom end up first and that just look sad. If a country can’t compete with top 5 than do not send them, it just makes it look terrible. 

Strangest "Sports" at the Olympics

You hear the word “The Olympic games” and what is the first sport that comes to your head? Most likely Track & Field. But there was a time where we did have the strangest sports in the Olympics and some were just too funny to watch. 

 In the early Olympics the only sports that were practicing was Track & Field, Roman Wrestling and some other minor sports but every Olympics ( every 4 years)  we are experiencing some new sports, some survive to the next Olympics and some dies. Today we have 35 sports, could you believe that? Imagine if you would try to follow all those events during the Olympics. You would go insane. 

Some sports in the Olympics just did not seem as a “Sport”, sports such as:

Tug of War- Believe it or not but this used to be a major sport from 1900-1920 

Live Pigeon Shooting- I was shocked when my dad told me about this but in the early 1900 live pigeons were released in front of a shooter and the guy who killed most birds would win but if he missed two shots in a row than he would automatically lose. They stopped this “Sport” at the Olympics because it got to messy.

Weight lifting with one hand- Yes as the title says, they were allowed to only use one hand to lift the weight over their head. This was discontinued in 1908

I believe that non of these "sports" would have been popular this year and I am happy that we save the Pigeons because we know that there are not to many of them in New York!