The ever-expanding balloon of Olympics blogs, stats databases, podcasts, and other forms of online coverage has left some outlets reaching for new angles on the Games. Doing their part to feed this information binge, a few have turned to Olympic archives and disinterred the competition’s “forgotten” sports, retired games of past Olympics like rugby (1900-24), pigeon shooting (1900), and solo synchronized swimming (1984-92). NBC, via the History Channel, has even posted “Olympic Forgotten Games” videos and slideshows marveling at the crazy pursuits that once passed for Olympic-level competition.
But few of these also-ran sports have been described in tones quite as incredulous as what has become the poster forgotten sport: the tug of war. “Believe it or not,” scoffs the “Forgotten” video, “the tug of war was once an established event at the Olympic Games.”
I believe it. And what’s more, I believe we should bring it back. The tug of war is the perfect Olympic sport.
The tug of war, now made to epitomize the fusty, dusty, discontinued Olympic sports, was actually among the least ridiculous and most enduring of them, held during six Games from 1900 to 1920 (only yachting lasted longer before it petered out). In a show of pure team strength and coordination, teams of five to ten had to pull their opponents six feet over a dividing line, and…well, that’s all there was to it. Yet the sport had its milestones, as when a French team member at the 1900 Games became the first black Olympian, and even its equivalent of a doping scandal, when a losing American team at the 1908 Games accused the British victors of wearing performance-enhancing shoes that were specially weighted and studded.
But over time, tug of war developed an image problem, and today we think of it as merely a means to settle playground pissing matches. Writes one commentator of it and its ilk, “The Olympic Games were more like games kids might play in the backyard.” Most of us can only imagine serious tug of war as a curio of sepia-toned times, played by mustachioed men who rode home on bicycles with comically large front wheels after their postgame showers.
Tug of war, however, remains a quietly popular sport worldwide. Next month’s World Outdoor Tug of War Championship, to be held in Stenungsund, Sweden, is slated to feature teams from some twenty nations, including Lithuania, Taiwan, Nigeria, and the US. The Tug of War International Federation (TWIF) website lists active national tug of war organizations in more than fifty countries. Israel has one. So does Iran. Our own United States Tug of War Association (USATOWA) hosts numerous junior, adult, men’s, and women’s competitions across the country every year. Today’s game has all the trappings of a serious sport—referees, weight divisions, time limits. There is no question that the sport has the global following and organization already in place to draw a robust level of Olympic participation and reception.
But so do golf, rugby, and baseball, the former two of which also have asked politely for decades that they please be admitted to the Olympic roster, and the latter of which is actually being jettisoned from the Games after Beijing. So what sets tug of war apart that it should be the next sport drafted into the Games?
Well, there are thousands of tournaments worldwide for amateur athletes. The Olympics may showcase these athletes, but they exist for fans. 114 million viewers tuned in during the first two days in Beijing. And tug of war could be the most telegenic sport out there.
Part of the dismissive attitude toward the sport today derives from the fact that tug of war is a game simple enough to make sense to children. But far from there being anything wrong with this, it’s one of the sport’s most attractive qualities. The Olympics heaves with games like synchronized swimming and the no less than six different equestrian events, bloated non-sports freighted with obscure rules and indecipherable scoring methodologies. There are a handful of popular sports that suffer from this—you’re probably bluffing if you say you can gauge the quality of a performance on the uneven bars short of whether or not the gymnast falls off them—but for the most part, such inaccessible sports are relegated to mid-morning broadcasts because no one cares to follow them. And as for the stigma of tug of war as child’s play, I’d rather watch Olympic Red Rover than “racewalking.”
More appealing still, tug of war, like swimming or sprinting, is the essence of pure competition. There are no heats, no scores, no style points, just eight very large people throwing as much as 1500 lbs into the effort of yanking another team into submission. It would be the most visceral team sport in the Games, if not the most visceral sport, period. Even most other mano a mano sports are not as directly agonistic. Runners and cyclers race simultaneously, but the strength or skill of one competitor is not the primary obstacle to the performance of others. Other sports contested head-on, like tug of war, are either too long (soccer, water polo), complicated (taekwondo), uncomfortable (Greco-Roman wrestling), or un-American (fencing) to garner much viewer interest outside of the medal rounds. With most tug of war leagues capping matches at five easily-slotted-between-commercials minutes, the sport is the type of short, intense, brutal entertainment that makes for great sports television. Raw, macho sports like Ultimate Fighting and American Gladiators games already dominate viewership in the predictable demographics. All tug of war needs is a little rebranding magic.
Of course, any Olympic event that will really get us on the edges of our Barcaloungers needs to be set against a human drama, and that usually means multiple-medal quests or team rivalries. Tug of war can easily accommodate the former. As a strength sport, its athletes are often competitive in other field games as well. In fact, American tug of war team member Frank Kugler still remains the only Olympian ever to medal in three different sports in the same Olympics, also taking the podium in weightlifting and wrestling in 1904. And as for rivalries, well, the name of the sport is literally a synonym for adversarial competition. “To pull for a team,” “to drop the rope”: this is the sport that gave us the very language of antagonism.
An Olympic future for tug of war is not unrealistic. In past Games, cities could elect to stage unofficial “demonstration sports,” which were usually endemic to the culture of the host country—baseball in Los Angeles, Basque pelota in Barcelona. If these sports debuted successfully, they might eventually gain official Olympic status. After 1992, the International Olympic Committee put a moratorium on the practice, but this year Beijing has received blessing to organize a wushu martial arts tournament in what is functionally the same thing as a demonstration sport setup.
The next Summer Olympics will be in London, which may give the British a chance to hold a similar dog-and-pony show for their own culture of sport. While tug of war has existed as long as man has had the ability to seize objects and the unwillingness to relinquish them, the sport in its current form was first popularized in the Commonwealth and probably still enjoys its greatest enthusiasm there (though the TWIF is headquartered in Wisconsin). So if there ever were a Games ripe for the reintroduction of tug of war, London 2012 is it. And indeed, TWIF Magazine reports that IOC member Princess Anne recently attended a championship match and followed up with a missive of gratitude to the organization that read, in part, “The Princess Royal no doubt will take her thoughts back to the IOC, and although a minority sport, [tug of war] will hopefully raise the profile and perhaps competing in the London 2012 Olympics may be a goal to aspire to.”
An alternative approach could involve refashioning the prodigal sport as simply an event, one of many under the genus “track and field.” (The distinction: swimming is a sport; 100m freestyle is an event.) There is no bureaucratic freeze on adding new events to the Games. Indeed, this year sees the first-time inclusion of BMX biking in the Olympics, as a cycling event.
Tug of war’s home, for now, is at the World Games, a bizarro, odd-year Olympics of sideshow sports like korfball, artistic roller skating, Latin dance, and dragon boat racing. This seems like an unceremonious pension for a former Olympic sport as popular, watchable, and marketable as tug of war. Perhaps for 2012, the IOC will reconsider its obvious appeal and rehabilitate the tug of war. I’ll be pulling for it.
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