By the wayside: retired Winter Olympic sports of yesteryear

Throughout the history of Olympic competition, new sports have been gradually added to the list of events at each session.

The most basic sporting contests, running races, were included in the original Olympic Games in Ancient Greece, dating back to the 8th century BC. Other competitions contrived at that time still take place in the modern adaptations of the Games, such as javelin, discus and long jump.

The first revival of the Games in modern times, held in 1896, fittingly in Athens, hosted events in nine separate sports. In the decades since, the Games have expanded, so much so that the 2020 Summer Games in Tokyo (held in 2021) featured 33 distinct types of sporting events.

In fact, the Winter Games themselves were an addition in 1924 to the existing Olympic festivities.

However, many sports that were contested in the past have since been eliminated from Olympic competition. Sports and games such as polo, croquet and tug-of-war, which were all included in the Summer Olympics at various points during the early 20th century, have all since been dropped from the docket.

The Winter Games, despite its rapid expansion and incorporation of new sports and disciplines during each adaptation of the event, also has scrapped a number of events over the century since its inception.

The most thundering of these since-cut winter events is surely skijoring. The sport, the name of which is Norwegian for "ski driving," involves a sled being pulled across snowy ground. The engine doing the tugging can be a horse, a dog, or even a motor vehicle.

The sport was included as a demonstration sport at the 1928 Winter Games in Switzerland, featuring riderless horses dragging behind them upright humans on sleds. Despite the seemingly perilous nature of horses with no jockeys at the helm bounding across snowy terrain with standing humans sliding in tow, the event went on as planned that year.

However, perhaps due to that very same reason, skijoring never made another appearance at the Games and never became an official sport. It is, though, still a popular activity in Scandinavia and Switzerland to this day.

Sled dog racing, technically falling under the umbrella of skijoring but including teams of multiple dogs pulling a rider for much longer distances, was a part of the 1932 Winter Games. These riders, like their counterparts pulled by horses, only saw Olympic competition in one edition of the Games. Sled dog racers, or mushers, as they are officially known, can still compete in races around the world, the most famed of which is the annual 1,510-kilometer Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race in Alaska, USA.

In a dramatic shift in tenor from the grueling to the fanciful, "ski ballet" was also a former component of the Winter Games proceedings. Popularized during the 1970s and 80s as part of show-tours for professional freestyle skiers, it debuted at the Olympics in 1988 as a demonstration event.

Competitors flipped, spun, tumbled and somersaulted on skis under the close observation of a panel of judges. Scoring operated much like figure skating in which judges assigned scores based on the difficulty and aesthetics of each maneuver.

The event returned in 1992, again with demo status, but was jettisoned thereafter.

One discipline of sport that has survived the test of time in the Summer Games is the pentathlon. As the Greek derivative of its name suggests, this event consists of five different competitions combined into one: fencing, freestyle swimming, equestrian show jumping, pistol shooting and cross-country running. The current version of this five-tiered event is the modern adaptation of its ancient Greek precursor, which featured entirely disparate events like javelin throwing and wrestling.

At the 1948 Winter Games, a snow-covered variation was introduced to the field in Switzerland, replacing cross-country running with skiing of the same type and swimming with downhill skiing – quite reasonably so, I might add. Unfortunately for the Swedish pentathletes, who swept the podium that year, winning all three medals, the winter event was axed from the schedule for the following Olympics and has yet to be reinstated.

While ice hockey and association football are staples of the Winter and Summer Games, respectively, there once existed a sport at the wintertime competition that combined aspects of both sports into a new mash-up of an event called "bandy."

An activity that dates back to the 1800s, the game is played on an ice-covered surface much more similar to the size of a football field than a common ice rink. The players, each team of which consists of 11 position players and one goaltender, carry sticks not totally dissimilar to those used in ice hockey. The difference lies in their curvature. Bandy sticks have a sharper bend because the sport is played not with a flat puck but with a ball, similar in size to a tennis ball, which the goaltenders may use their gloved hands to catch or block – they are not equipped with any type of stick, curved or otherwise.

This sport, known in Russia as "hockey with a ball," is very popular in several Scandinavian and former Soviet nations, but after its sole appearance at the Winter Games in 1952, it, too, was discarded from the Olympic ledger.

These sports are among a multitude of fascinating events that have, over the years, been eighty-sixed by the Olympic Committee. In many cases, this was very likely the correct decision, as safety protocols for Olympians in the twenty-first century are certainly more stringent than those of a century ago. But I'd be more than intrigued to see some of these sports make a return appearance at the Games in the future.

Bring them back for another go!