The Olympics has a weird past it doesn’t want to talk about!

The Olympic Games is single-handedly the most prestigious sports event that people across the globe wait for every four years. However, what you see as the games included in the modern Olympics are greatly different from the games that used to be included in the Olympics of the past. Some of these games were so weird that they could not stand the test of time and had to be removed.

Equestrian Long Jumping

Also known as horse long jump, equestrian long jumping was a sport included in the Olympic Games in 1900. However, that was the first and the last time the sport was ever seen played on the Olympics grounds. The sport was a definitely weird one since it involved horses going for long jumps where the rider’s athletic skills literally had zero credit. The Olympic Games are known to be more human-oriented, which why horse long jump did not seem to make the cut to hang around for long.

Tug Of War

Funny isn’t it? Imagine yourself growing up playing tug of war with your friends and you might as well have taken part in the Olympics. As silly as it sounds, Tug of war remained one of the Olympic Sports through two decades from 1900 to 1920. The sport had two large scrums of people holding on to a rope’s either side and pulling hard to get the other side towards their own. Apparently, the 2012 Olympics Games considered including tug of war into the events again, but that eventually did not pan out.

Dueling Pistols

Dueling was considered to be sport of the gentlemen in ancient England. Inevitably the old-fashioned dueling pistols are considered to be a thing of the past. However, during the early 1900s, dueling pistols appeared as a part of the Olympic Games and seemed to be a bizarre event. More so because the participants were made to fire their pistols not at actual people but rather at dummies.

 Pigeon Shooting

While clay pigeon shooting is still considered a sport in some parts of the world, the 1900 Olympics decided to turn it into a bloody mess. Instead of using inanimate pigeon sculptures for the shooting sport, the organizers thought it would be wise to create a massacre by using actual live pigeons in which hundreds of those innocent birds were killed.