[Syd Thrift]

Lawn bowling was actually an event in the 1988 Olympics in Seoul. If you go back to the early days, too, you're going to find some weird competitions and stuff you'd associate more with summer camp than the Olympics. Tug of war was an event in the early days, for instance. Also croquet. Also medieval tennis, aka jeu de paume.

And honestly a lot of sports that are just there that have been there forever are kind of weird too. Like the triple jump... I'm sorry but that crap is just goofy, and the fact that people spend literal years perfecting the hopping event only makes it goofier. And honestly hurdles are just... man, who thought of "hey, let's make running in a straight line harder by making the athletes have to jump over obstacles every ten meters"? That one might even be more sensical on paper than IRL because IRL it just looks silly. Also Greco-Roman wrestling. Not saying regular / freestyle wrestling is dumb - I wrestled in high school, it's a sport with a lot of strategy involved - but Greco-Roman is the version where you can't do leg takedowns, which makes it a lot like sumo, which, well, is sumo wrestling.