The 1900 Olympic Games in Paris hosted what was surely the weirdest and most bizarre Olympic event of all time: live pigeon shooting. The winner was Leon de Lunden of Belgium, who bagged 21 of the 300 birds that were released to the gun-toting competitors. Perhaps the sight of all those gory feathers fluttering down from the Olympic sky was too horrible for the audience and the organizers; the event never returned. It may not have been an official Olympic sport, either — the IOC barely acknowledges Mr. de Lunden or the event in its archives. Yet pigeon shooting is just one of the strange competitions that give the 1900 Paris Olympics the gold for hosting the oddest events. There were long jump and high jump competitions — for horses. For humans (men only), there was the standing broad jump and the standing high jump, both made without a running start. The gymnastic contestants had to struggle with rope climbing and lifting a stone that weighed 50 kg (about 110 pounds). The tug-of-war,
↧
