The Olympic Games are the biggest global showcase of sports and competitions that there is. It is truly a joy to watch athletes train their whole lives for a particular sport and finally showcase their talents in front of a worldwide audience. We admire Olympic athletes as they achieve things that ordinary people can only dream of achieving.
When you think about it, a lot of the Olympic events are really scary.
The average person is not built to withstand the rigors of the Olympics. The thought of taking part in rugby, judo or long-distance swimming is a frightening proposition. These are sports we would never want to attempt at the Summer Olympics.
wrestling
I always ask myself the same question: which of these sports will change me forever? In this respect, it has to be Olympic wrestling. In all the other sports, you have to come up with an escape route, a way to escape danger. There are a lot of scary sports in the Olympics, but in wrestling, there is no place to hide.
Sure, I could jump off the mat, walk out of the arena, and get on the next plane back to North Carolina, but if I have If you compete, you will be thoroughly beaten by the wrestlers.
Here’s how it goes: I walk up to a wrestler, try to engage in a fistfight, get hit in a fireman’s carry, land on my back, my shoulder stretched so far I tore my rotator cuff, and my neck stretched so far I have to buy a Sleep Number bed to sleep on at night.
A modern-day Kurt Angle decided to destroy me and I became a broken shell of my former self.
James Deiter
High Diving
Let me just say one thing.
I’m afraid of heights.
I’ve written about this fear before: Despite being invited to New York City by Williams for the launch of their FW46, their 2024 F1 season challenger, I nearly turned back when I arrived and found out the event was taking place in the Rainbow Room at 30 Rock, 65 stories up in the city, so there was a chance I’d get dizzy and fall off the side as soon as I reached the platform.
And even if you do manage to try diving, there’s a good chance you’ll fail there too. In high school, I attended Dartmouth Football Camp, held at Dartmouth College every summer. One summer, all the players were given free reign to spend the afternoon at the school pool. I tried out for the high diving board, intending to dive feet-first. But I spun too far and ended up flat on my stomach from an impossible height.
So, in summary, absolutely not.
Mark Schofield
Water polo
Growing up, I heard horror stories from my water polo-playing friends and always thought they were just teenage girls being dramatic, but after watching the USA vs. Spain women’s water polo match on Tuesday, I started to believe it all.
The sport is exhausting, it’s difficult, and I still don’t know what is and isn’t illegal because it seems like you’re constantly punching each other while trying not to drown. There are barely any breaks and the players never stop moving. One game made me want to gulp down a Gatorade. If I tried this sport I’d probably just fill a pool with tears and cry the whole time, but at least I’d have quads of steel.
One thing is clear: people who play water polo are tough people.
Beth Maiman
rugby
Many people think of rugby as soccer without pads, and to some extent that’s true. There are seven to eleven players on the field at the same time, a rectangular ball, and people Blown up A bone-crushing tackle, and without padding.
The comparison ends here. Rugby is played in halves with minimal rest between plays, so it combines the physicality of football with the conditioning of soccer. No matter how good you were on your high school football team, you don’t have the stamina to run the length of the field without pads and get cut in half by tackles.
Rugby is great to watch, but the average person can’t just wake up in the morning and play in the Olympics.
— JP Acosta
Balance beam
Normal people on a balance beam:
I have a certain sense of balance, but when I see people doing flips and jumps on it, I could never do that.
— David Fucillo
Pole Vault
The pole vaulting is reminiscent of the famous scene in the first Star Wars where Luke races down a canyon on the Death Star at breakneck speed, trying to blow the whole thing up.
But instead of firing a torpedo into a space vent, you have to plunge a 17-foot pole at a precise angle and speed into a tiny hole in solid ground. And not only that, you also have to hang on to it for dear life, watch it bend, pray that it doesn’t snap, and then defy gravity to launch another pole 20 feet into the air, praying that you land safely on the other side without dying.
Sounds fun, right? That’s what I thought.
Bernd Buchmasser
triathlon
Any part of a triathlon is incredibly hard to do, but doing it all at once is definitely insane, but “normal” people do triathlons every weekend. The Olympics are clearly different, both in the athletes and the location.
A lot of people don’t know how grueling the triathlon swim is. Bodies clambering over each other, kicking and slapping in the water, sometimes even unintentionally. I don’t want to be involved with these world-class athletes trying to drown me. And we’re doing this in the perfectly clean Seine, so all the risks are multiplied. Don’t ever ask me about the Seine again.
Even if I survived the swim portion, the amount of effort required to get through the bike and run portion would have pushed me to the brink of death, meaning there was no way I would make it back to the Olympic Village, even if I actively tried to hang back and avoid the contention.
Kyle Sele
Marathon Swimming
If you think swimming 1.5km in the Seine is tough, try swimming 10km instead. An Olympic marathon swim is 10 miles. For Americans, it’s 6.2 miles, and takes the world’s best swimmers about two hours. In Paris, instead of using a pool or a large body of water, you’ll swim six laps of a circuit with the Seine’s current in your face for half the race and on your back for the other half.
In a normal marathon, you are allowed to stop running and take a short walk to catch your breath, hydrate, eat a snack, etc. Marathon swimmers are allowed to eat and drink while they swim, but are not allowed to touch the boat or get out of the water.
So I thought about canoe slalom, sailing, surfing, table tennis, triathlon and many other disciplines (equestrian, since I’ve never ridden a horse), but a marathon swim is the only one that could last forever and potentially kill me.
Matt Warren
