Aquatics 1896
Aquatics had included a lot of weird events like underwater swimming (1900), 200m obstacle swimming (1900) and a plunge for distance (1904). there were a 100m pool was used, the ocean (1896, the River Seine (1900), and a small lake in St. Louis, USA (1904), had been used in Olympic sites.
Decisions or goals were clear:
the rules for swimming, diving, and water polo were to be standard; to
keep the world records listed.
Archery 1900
Yes, archers today honor the fabled outlaw Robin Hood. The word "Robin Hood" now means splitting the shaft of an arrow alreadin in the target with another arrow.
A Standard bow is coated in fibreglass, the arrows are made out of aluminium and carbon graphite and can go more than 240 km/h.
Archers today compete in trying to get their arrow closest to the center of the target.
Athletics 1896
Athletics have an Olympic motto, "Citius, Altius, Forius", which means faster, higher, stronger.
Athletics (or track and field) is about jumping higher, throwing farther, and running faster than the other players. The ancient Olympics started with foot races. Today, athetics stays one of the most popular Olympic sports. From the 100m dash to the 42.195km marathon, from the hammer throw to the high jump.
Badminton 1992
Badminton is like tennis because players stand across a net from each other and hit something across the net with rackets. In badminton the net is lowered, and they use a shuttlecock instead of a tennis ball, and it is never to hit the ground, or the other team gets a point.
Basketball 1936
After basketball entered the Olympic Games for 36 years, it was a sport for men.
Women's basketball joined the Olympic program in 1976. Now there are men and women divisions. And it hasn't changed yet.
Boxing 1904
Boxing is among the most illustrious Olympic Games' sports. In the Ancient games, the gloves were strips of leather wrapped arod boxers' fists. The fight continued until one man went down. The gladiator dimension used gloves with spikes or weighted with led, and lots of fights often ended in death.
But today we use padded gloves, and we fight until someone gets KO-ed (knocked out for 10 seconds) or forfeits.
Canoe/Kayak 1936
The story of the canoe and kayakis back thousands of years to when natives careved these crafts to hunt fish, and travel. They were moved through the water by paddles usually made of wood.
Cycling 1896
Bicycles were first made in the
middle-18th century. Cycling at the Summer Olympics has three exciting
racing types: road, track, and mountain biking.
Equestrian 1900
Equestrian was introduced in the Olympic Games in 1900 and then in 1912. In the past, the three-day event contained: Jumping, Dressage, and Eventing. Equestrian is a sport in which a player rides a horse and tries to jump poles/hurdles as fast as they can.
Weight Lifting - There are two different kinds of weight lifting events in the games. One, the clean and jerk, is made of two bar movements. You move the bar up to your shoulder first and then you push it up over your head.
Soccer - Many countries don't compete in Olympic soccer because the World Cup is a greater award than an Olympic medal. Everyone on a men's team has to be under age 23 except for three players, but anyone can compete in the women's.
Volleyball - Normally vollyball is played inside with six players on a team, one team on each side, hitting a ball over a high net with their hands. Beach volleyball, which was only introduced to the games at the Olympics in Atlanta in 1996, is only played with two people on a team.
Softball - Softball is like baseball. The batter has about the same amount of time to react, because the pitcher may pitch slower, but the pitcher's mound is closer to the batter.
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Tae Kwon Doe
Various Korean forms of martial arts have existed but in the early 20th
century, taekwondo became the dominant form. In 1955 a group of
Korean martial arts leaders chose taekwondo as the definitive Korean
martial art in an attempt to promote its development internationally.
Korean general Choi Hong-Hi was designated as the official founder of
taekwondo.
In 1973, the Korean government
recognised the World Taekwondo
Federation (WTF) as the legitimate governing body of the sport, and the
first World Championships were held in that year.
Table Tennis
Gossima. Whiff-Whaff. Flim-Flam.
Ping-Pong.
Whatever name it assumes, table
tennis has come a long way since its
introduction as a genteel, after-dinner alternative to lawn tennis in 1890s
England. Today, players compete for big money, wield high-tech rackets
and volley the ball at speeds up to 160 kilometres per hour. Table tennis
has become the world's largest participation sport, with 40 million
competitive players worldwide and countless millions playing recreationally.
The game, which debuted in the
Olympic Games in 1988 at Seoul, began
with cigar-box lids for rackets and a carved champagne cork for a ball.
Today, players use specially developed rubber-coated wooden and
carbon-fibre rackets and a lightweight, hollow celluloid ball. Various
rubber
compounds and glues are applied on the rackets to impart greater spin or
speed.
Indeed, some glues are banned
from Olympic competition - they make
the ball travel up to 30km/h faster.
Triathlon
While taekwondo and triathlon
both debuted as the newest Olympic sports
at the Sydney 2000 Games, triathlon was literally the newest sport.
Although the origins of taekwondo date back thousands of years, the
triathlon dates back to 1978.
The first triathlon was
held in the south-western United States city of San
Diego in 1974, in many ways an outgrowth of the California jogging craze.
The ultimate endurance test, it requires athletes to excel at three very
different pursuits - swimming, cycling and running. The sport demands
particularly intense discipline because each area requires a high-level
training schedule.
Wrestling
If the Olympic Games are
a history of mankind, wrestling is the prologue.
When the ancient Games of the Olympiad were born, wrestling already was
an ancient game. Widely recognised as the world's oldest competitive
sport, wrestling appeared in a series of Egyptian wall paintings as many
as
5000 years ago. When the Games began in 776 BC, more than two
millenniums later, it included wrestling, and, in the years that followed,
wrestling featured as the main event.
The sport would return in a similar
role when the Olympic Games returned
after a 1500-year absence in 1896. Organisers, seeking direct links to
ancient times, found a natural in the sport that had enjoyed popularity
across much of the ancient world, from Greece, Assyria and Babylon to
India, China and Japan. They resurrected Greco-Roman wrestling, a style
they believed to be an exact carryover from the Greek and Roman
wrestlers of old.
In Greco-Roman wrestling,
the wrestlers used only their arms and upper
bodies to attack. They could hold only those same parts of their
opponents. It worked nicely from a historical perspective, but another
breezier style was sweeping across Great Britain and the United States
by
then. Known as "catch as catch can", it had become standard fare - and
popular professional entertainment - at fairs and festivals in both
countries.
In 1904, the Olympic Games
added the second wrestling event and called
it "freestyle". Now, wrestlers could use their legs for pushing, lifting
and
tripping, and they could hold opponents above or below the waist.
Tennis
When Irishman John Boland travelled
to Athens for the first modern
Olympic Games in 1896, he had no idea he would return home with the
gold medal in tennis. But then, he had no idea he would compete either
-
he went as a spectator.
Times have changed dramatically
for Olympic tennis since then. Today's
Olympic tennis players include some of the highest-profile athletes in
the
world. Accustomed to five-star hotels and high-stakes prize money, at the
Olympic Games they will bunk in the Olympic Village and compete for
nothing but a gold medal.
Tennis was dropped from the Olympic
programme after 1924 amid turmoil
over such issues as where to draw the line between amateurism and
professionalism, and it didn't return as a medal sport until 1988. Today,
Olympic competition includes men's and women's singles and men's and
women's doubles.
GYMNASTICS
THE FEDERATION INTERNATIONALE
DE GYMNASTIQUE (FIG) WAS FORMED ON JULY 23, 1881 WHEN REPRESENATIVES OF
THE GYMNASTICS ASSOCIATIONS OF BELGIUM, FRANCE, AND THE NETHERLANDS MET
IN LIEGE. IN 1897, 17 NATIONAL ASSOCIATIONS JOINED TOGETHER TO FORM
THE BASIS OF THE EUROPEAN GYMNASTICS FEDERATION. HOWEVER, WHEN THE
USA JOINED IN 1921, THE COMMITTEE CHANGED ITS NAME BACK TO FIG.
HANDBALL
THE MODERN GAME OF HAND BALL WAS
FIRST PLAYED TOWARDS THE END OF THE 19TH CENTURY IN DENMARK, GERMANY, AND
SWEDEN. AFTER THE MEN’S GAME DEBUTED ON TURF FOOTBALL FIELDS AT THE
1936 GAMES IN BERLIN, THE EUROPEAN- BASED SPORT NEXT APPEARED IN ITS PRESENT
INDOOR FORM IN 1972 AT MUNICH. A WOMAN’S DIVISION OPENED IN 1976.
HOCKEY
HOCKEY IS THE OLDEST BALL AND STICK GAME. RECORDS EXIST OF IT HAVING BEEN PLAYED IN PERSIA IN 2000 BC. IN MEDIEVAL EUROPE, PICTURES OF MEN PLAYING WITH HOOKED STICKS APPEAR ON STAINED- GLASS WINDOWS AT BOTH CANTERBURY ANDGLOUCESTER CATHEDRALS. THE NAME HOCKEY PROBABLY DERIVES FROM THE FRENCH HOCQUET, OR SHEPARD’S CROOK, AND REFERS TO THE CROOKED STICK.
JUDO
JUDO MEANS THE “GENTLE WAY” IN
JAPANESE. Of course, it is derived in part from jujitsu, the hand-to-hand
combat technique of ancient samurai warriors, and everything is relative.
While throwing opponents to the floor wins most matches, it is the only
Olympic sport where submission holds allow choking an opponent or breaking
an arm.
MODERN PENTATHALON
A young French cavalry officer of the 19th century was sent on horseback to deliver a message. He rode across the uneven terrain, through enemy lines, and was confronted by a soldier with his sword drawn. Challenged to a duel, the officer won, only to have his horse shot out from under him by another enemy soldier.
After felling that soldier with a single shot, the officer ran on. He swam across a raging river, and then finally he delivered the message. So, legend has it, was born the modern pentathlon.
The brainchild of Baron Pierre
de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympic Games, the event was based
upon the unlucky officer and introduced into the Stockholm Games of 1912.
Only remotely resembling the ancient pentathlon inspired by the warmongering
Spartans, modern pentathletes shoot, fence, swim, compete in show jumping
and run - five events testing endurance as well as athletic versatility.
ROWING
Rowing is an endurance test that
finishes at a speed of up to 10 meters a second. Crews cover the middle
1000 meters at about 40 strokes per minute, but, over the first and last
500 meters, shift up a gear to as many as 47.
SAILING
Sailing first became an Olympic sport in Paris in 1900, where time handicaps were used to referee the race. The race format and the classes of competing boats have changed frequently since then. Olympic racing is now conducted with boats categorised into one-design classes based on similar weights and dimensions.
SHOOTING
Olympic history abounds with tales of athletes who overcame crippling adversity to win gold medals, but Karoly Takacs' comeback may be the best. Takacs was part of Hungary's world-champion pistol-shooting team in 1938 when an army grenade exploded in his right hand. Ten years later, he won the first two golds in rapid-fire pistol - after teaching himself to shoot left-handed.
In a sport where the bullseye looks about the size of the punctuation mark at the end of this sentence, a sport where shooters compete amid a disharmony of noise and still concentrate on firing between heartbeats, Takacs' achievement tests the imagination.
From just three shooting events
at the 1896 Olympic Games to 17 today, the sport has grown steadily. In
part this leap can be attributed to advances in the technology of firearms
and equipment, which have led to constant changes in the shooting competition.
But it can also be attributed to the thrill shooters have for their sport.