Who thinks of these things?

Pretty much since I was a kid I've been fascinated by sports events that are actually combinations of events, where an athlete has to be good at everything to win the medal. I think it was because the American Bruce Jenner won the Decathlon at the 1976 Summer Olympics, when I was five, and the event just stuck in my brain. After all, everyone was talking about it, and he was on the front of the Wheaties boxes, so it must have been a matter of earth-shaking importance, right? Thus the five-year-old mind works. I wonder what the Pillowfight Fairy will consider of earth-shaking importance....

I digress. Then there's the Triathlon, which tests sheer, iron endurance of the competitors. I still wonder how people can race for that long without killing themselves.

But then, I started to get exposed to combinations of events that seemed a little incongruous. Who decided to put those events together, and why? The first time I wondered this was when, as a child, I watched a Biathlon event on TV. The competitors combine Nordic skiing with marksmanship, of all things; they ski long distances, then drop to the ground, pull their rifles off their backs, shoot at several targets, then off they go again. As I said, this looked a little incongruous at first--until someone explained that the event started as training exercises in the Swedish and Norwegian armies. These military forces deploy soldiers trained to move about on skis. Because of the terrain and climate in Scandanavia, soldiers must be able to ski long distances and shoot accurately. Ok, that one makes sense.

But I'm apparently not the only one out there who finds the combination of different sports interesting--even humorous. The movie Baseketball involves a hybrid sport of Baseball and Basketball. And there are plenty of other examples--like the Monty Python sketches about "Olympic Hide-and-Seek" and "Upper Middle-Class Twit of the Year" competitions, and the Muppet Sports skit of cross-country billiards. And of course, there were all those beer commercials from several years back that wanted to illustrate the novelty of "less filling, tastes great" by mixing different television shows, giving us Full-Contact Golf (Golf + Football), Beauty Pageant Hockey, and Professional Culinary Wrestling.

And then I was introduced by a former co-worker to the concept of joggling, or juggling while jogging. It's supposed to build dexterity and cardiovascular fitness at the same time, but I can't help but imagine that its practicioners are prone to chest injuries that look vaguely like parking meters, mailboxes, streetlights, other jogglers....

But nothing prepared me for the one I read today, hat tip to the Volokh Conspiracy .

London - Andreas Dilschneider was still thinking about his opening moves on the chessboard when his opponent rushed up to him and punched him. Several times.

That's right, folks, I present for your consideration the surreal phenomenon of Chessboxing.

And while that's surreal enough, I loved the descriptions of other niche sports mentioned on the second page of the article, that go by names like blokarting, blackminton, tchoukball, urban golf, underwater hockey, and street luge. Um, you may want to wear a helmet on that last one. And body armor wouldn't hurt, except that it might....

Wow. I'm curious, are there any other hybrid sports you would like to see? Note, this doesn't mean you actually want to do them, just see them.


Update: ten seconds after I hit "Publish Post", my dear wife piped up with "Bungee Fishing?" So remember all that stuff I said about her being the practical one of the family? Nevermind....