Did you know these crazy 'sports' were once in the Olympics?!

These days, the Olympics are a professional, streamlined event with 10,000+ athletes from across the world competing for a coveted gold medal. Back in the day, things were a little different, let's take a look at some of the whacky events that used to be in the Olympics!

The modern Olympic Games started in 1896 in Athens, Greece. Given the time period, the events chosen for some of the early editions of the games were slightly different to what we are used to today, verging from the bizarre to the absolutely ridiculous.

The 1908 Olympics were held in London and one of the events chosen for this Olympics was pistol dueling. Although this seems incredibly dangerous, the organizers did at least think to use wax bullets and give the competitors protective masks. This event never took off and was never seen again.

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That tug of war was in the Olympics is strange enough, but countries could enter more than one team, using established club teams as their representatives. This led to bizarre circumstances in 1904 when the USA won all three medals, Great Britain repeating the feat four years later. We last saw this event in 1920.

Yup, this is a real thing. Competitors had to dive from a stationary position and, according to the official rules, “Upon reaching the water the plunger glides face downward for a period of 60 seconds without imparting any propulsion to the body from the arms and legs." With the winner traveling the furthest distance. Only seen in 1904, this event only had five competitors.

1900 was a different time, OK? Another event that only took place in one Olympics, the 1900 edition of the games in Paris saw over 300 pigeons killed during the competitions. Fortunately for pigeons everywhere, organizers swapped to clay ‘pigeons’ from 1902.

We’re back in Paris for another truly unhinged Olympic sport, competitors dove into the river Seine and had to climb over and dive under various obstacles along a 200-meter course. The winner, Frederick Lane of Australia, also won the 200-meter freestyle race which featured the usual number of obstacles (0).

Look, Paris at the turn of the century must have been a very weird place, there’s no other way to explain their decision-making. The poodle clipping event was technically only a test event, but it still involved 128 competitors attempting to clip the hair off as many poodles as they could in two hours. Sure, why not?

Paris, 1900, again. And yes, this is what you’d expect, horses being made to jump really high and then really far.

Of all the strange sports on this list, this might be the least weird, but still, really quite odd. This event appeared in four Olympics, last featuring in 1932.

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Known as "the sport of kings", real tennis is held inside on a very specialized court and was typically reserved for the wealthy elite. Naturally, this event was held at the 1908 games in London, but much to the chagrin of the British competitors, an American ended up the victor.

Another event featured in the 1908 games, motorboating was seen by some as a way for the British to rig the home games in their favor given their prowess in the sport. If this was the case, they certainly capitalized, winning all three available medals.

The start of the twentieth century saw hot air ballooning become incredibly popular, seen as a novel and exciting new mode of travel. The events saw records broken as Henry de La Vaulx traveled over 1200 km, starting in Paris and ending his competitive flight in Ukraine!

Moving over to the Winter Olympics here, Skijoring is sort of like water skiing, but on snow and instead of a boat pulling you, it’s a horse. Anyway, this event only occurred at the Olympics once, in 1928 in St. Moritz, Switzerland.

The marathon itself is a perfectly acceptable event, but the 1904 edition in St. Louis, Missouri really brought out the weird and wonderful nature of early Olympic games. The supposed winner, Frederick Lorz, was actually driven to the finish whilst the real winner had been dosed on brandy, raw eggs, and strychnine, by his trainers needing to be dragged over the finish as a result. Crazy.

The 1936 Olympics is best known for Jesse Owens showing up Hitler’s racist ideologies, but a lesser-known component of the games was the gliding competition. Somehow, only one competitor died during this event and was in the process of becoming a long term event before the outbreak of the Second World War.

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