Sports are interesting and people tend to follow various sports. Besides watching streams online or on TV, many people like spending their free time on sites like bonuscodebets.ie. All sports fans have sports they prefer and these are usually popular ones like football, basketball, ice hockey, American football, tennis, golf and more.
Other sports, like winter sports, don’t get as much attention, until the Winter Olympics are there. Then, you see interesting sports being contested and people doing extreme things. However, the Olympics feature some sports, and the more daring and crazy ones are still out there, to be discovered by you.
Today, you will learn about some winter sports that are otherwise unknown.
Skijoring
St. Moritz had some interesting demonstration sports when the Winter Olympics were hosted there. Particularly in the early days of the modern Olympics, we saw some really fun sports.
Skijoring was presented at the 1928 Olympics in St. Moritz. It is quite the sport, where you get hauled by horses on the frozen lake of St. Moritz, grabbing a harness which is attached to the horse’s reins. The horse has no rider. The human is basically holding on while riding a pair of skis.
The sport originated from Scandinavia where dogs and horses can be used to pull people for racing. Despite its 1928 appearance, it was never seen again at the Olympics, but it still lives on in Switzerland, the American West and of course, in Scandinavia.
Ski Ballet
Who said that only the early Olympics had some funky demonstration sports? At the 1988 and 1992 Winter Olympics, the discipline of Ski Ballet was present. It involves doing dance choreographies on a pair of skis while going downhill, slalom style. It is a very fun and dangerous sport which really tests people’s skills, those of moving to the rhythm of music and handling a pair of skis while going downhill relatively fast.
The event, despite it being rather fun, wasn’t really popular and was eventually discontinued as a formal competition, in the year 2000. It still lives on as an amateur sport and people still show off their best dance moves.
Speed Skiing
This is a sport that people consider dangerous, albeit it is hardly more dangerous than skeleton, which is luge with your head going first. This sport appeared at the 1992 Winter Olympics in Albertville, France.
It involves people going downhill, really fast, on a pair of skis. There is no turning, just going fast, down an extremely steep hill, at 59 degrees. After they pick up speed, they have to go through a 100 meter run, and it is during that run that they should reach maximum speed.
At those Olympics, two world records were broken, in both the men’s and women’s categories.
The sport ended abruptly when during a practice run, swiss skier Nicolas Bochatay collided with a snow grooming machine, ending with a fatality.
Winter sports can be very interesting and these ones certainly aren’t. It’s too bad that they are not Olympic events, as they would definitely be attracting lots of attention.