I have always enjoyed the Olympics, and it seems like every time the games come around I find a new sport that fascinates me. In 2024 Lachlan Earnshaw posted a series of videos where he and his brother attempted to do every event in the Summer Olympics in a week. It is a fantastic video series and worth watching if you haven't already seen it.
This will entail quite a lot, below are all the Olympic Sports and their disciplines. I have also included any individual events that I am interested in trying.
- Aquatics
- Artistic Swimming
- Diving
- Marathon Swimming
- Swimming
- 1500 m Freestyle
- 200 m Individual Medley
- 400 m Individual Medley
- Water Polo
- Archery
- Athletics
- Decathlon/Heptathlon/Pentathlon
- 5k Run
- 10k Run
- Marathon
- Steeplechase
- Race Walk
- Badminton
- Baseball/Softball?
- Basketball
- 3x3
- Standard
- Boxing
- Canoeing
- Slalom
- Sprint
- Cricket?
- Cycling
- BMX Freestyle
- BMX Racing
- Mountain Bike
- Road
- Road Race
- Time Trial
- Track
- Equestrian
- Dressage
- Eventing
- Jumping
- Fencing
- Epee
- Foil
- Sabre
- Field Hockey
- Flag Football?
- Football (Soccer)
- Golf
- Gymnastics
- Artistic
- Rhythmic
- Trampoline
- Handball
- Judo
- Lacrosse?
- Modern Pentathlon
- Rowing
- Coastal
- Rowing
- Sailing
- Shooting
- Air Pistol/Air Rifle/Pistol/Rifle
- Skeet
- Trap
- Skateboarding
- Sport Climbing
- Bouldering
- Speed
- Tope Rope
- Squash?
- Surfing
- Table Tennis
- Taekwondo
- Tennis
- Triathlon
- Volleyball
- Beach
- Indoor
- Weightlifting
- Wrestling
- Freestyle
- Greco-Roman
- Biathlon
- Bobsled
- Bobsled
- Skeleton
- Curling
- Ice Hockey
- Luge
- Skating
- Figure
- Speed and Short-track Speed
- Skiing
- Alpine
- Cross-Country
- Freestyle
- Moguls
- Ski Cross
- Ski Jump (maybe) also Nordic Combined
- Snowboard
- Ski Mountaineering
That is around 80 sports to try, which feels fairly impossible, especially as the IOC constantly adds and removes sports and disciplines. So how do I plan on accomplishing this? I plan to try each sport in one of three ways: compete: enter into a competition with some degree of preparation with the intent to win, personal challenge: take part in the sport either in a competition or informally with the goal of seeing how well I can do, and experience: in one way or another just get a sense for what this sport entails. In addition, some of these sports, like Climbing and Surfing, are deeply tied to cultures that do not really align with competitions, so for a few of these I would like to try to take the activity back to its roots and experience it that way.
Some individual sports have some unique considerations. For Swimming and Athletics, there are too many events, so, for now, I will focus on combined events: the individual medleys in swimming and hopefully the pentathlon/decathlon to do as many events in short time. For the summer sports with a question mark, these were added for the 2028 Games, so if I do not get to them by then and the sport is then dropped, I will likely not do those sports.
I am very interested in trying Track Cycling, but some of the events involve either teams or require a field of competitors, so I might have to figure something else out. The history of the sport is really interesting and I might look back into it to find a suitably intense replacement. For wrestling, I want to do an event that is focused on takedowns, but adult greco-roman/freestyle tournaments are rare where I live; I might try to do a beach wrestling competition or I just might end up writing about wrestling in high school.
For the winter sports, I think that I will mostly just find ways to experience them; however, I am interested in doing at least one cross-country skiing race and maybe a ski mountaineering race. I have been downhill skiing on and off since I was 10, so I will likely just use this as an excuse to take lessons and try to get better at downhill and moguls. That is not to say should an opportunity to compete arise that I would not take it.
In addition to all of this, I want to try to take classes or enter competitions for the artistic disciplines that were once contested at the Olympics. The "pentathlon of the muses" are:
- Architecture
- Literature
- Music
- Painting
- Sculpture
I am not artistically inclined, so these may be the most difficult tasks for me. In addition, I will definitely be taking on outside challenges and finding other distractions which I might write about as well.
