10 bizarre Olympic sports that don't exist anymore from ski ballet to hot air ballooning

The Olympic Games have showcased the pinnacle of sporting achievement for over a century, with a medal from any one of the 55 winter or summer games signalling an athlete who has mastered their discipline.

But the Olympics have not always been as polished as they are today, with the bar for what counted as a sport, or a competitor, being much lower when the games were reinstated in 1896, roughly 1500 years after the last games in Greece.

Many of these early games, as well as some of the later ones, featured sports that are hard to conceive of in the modern era. Two even involved shooting at living creatures, including humans.

While it is probably a good thing that 'dueling with pistols' is no longer a competitive sport on the world stage, some of these wackier events are so insane to contemplate that organizers should consider reintroducing them, even if just for the viewers at home.

Hot air ballooning

Back at the turn of the 20th century, hot air ballooning was all the craze, as we were still taking our first baby steps to mastering the skies. So, at the 1900 Olympics in Paris, people actually competed with hot air balloons.

These... athletes? Pilots? Whatever they were, they would compete for who could fly their balloon the fastest, reach the highest altitude, and even who could take the best aerial photograph.

While it doesn't exist as an Olympic sport anymore, the sight of hundreds of balloons competing in the skies over France must have been some spectacle.

Obstacle swimming

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) must be petitioned for this to return as a standalone sport. Imagine a sport where Michael Phelps has to navigate a series of Wipeout-style obstacles while maintaining a perfect butterfly stroke.

Sadly, this incredibly cool-sounding event only appeared at the 1900 Olympics, where, as you will see in this list, basically anything could be included as a sport if enough people wanted to do it.

Dueling with pistols

An event so dumb that you simply have to respect it. Although dueling with pistols did not involve firing deadly bullets at each other, it's quite easy to see why this one did not make it into the modern Olympics.

Instead, in 1908, competitors shot wax bullets at each other on the count of three. Though they were wearing protective equipment over their torso, face, and hands, this still sounds a bit too stupid for the world's top sporting event.

Plunge for distance

The plunge for distance is a sport that sounds incredibly cool but would be essentially pointless to watch. As you can probably imagine, this event involved taking a big dive and seeing how deep you could plunge.

So you would basically just be watching someone fall for one second, only to wait up to a minute for them to re-emerge. It was shelved after appearing only at the 1904 St Louis games.

Art, architecture, and literature

Now if there's one part of the old Olympic schedule that is less of a spectator sport than the plunge for distance, it's definitely the old artistic disciplines that were part of the games from 1912 to 1948.

The inclusion of art was part of the original vision of the Olympic Movement's founder, French baron Pierre de Frédy, in a time when the games would take place over a longer period and across a country.

This meant that awards could be given for particularly stunning architecture projects, or a country's best new sculpture. The only limiting factor was that the art had to celebrate sport in some way.

Incidentally, this is also part of the reason why the arts were removed from the Olympics. Former IOC president Pierre de Coubertin said the games' literary entries were particularly poor, as writers are 'wholly unfamiliar with the joys of violent muscular effort'. Which is fair.

Ski ballet

Another event that, by name alone, you know should be brought back to the Winter Olympics. With this year's Milan-Cortina games showing how drone cameras can transform how viewers see action on the slopes, I want to see the world's best skiers pirouetting to dance music in 4K.

This event actually almost made it to becoming an official Olympic sport, featuring at both the 1988 and 1992 winter games. But sadly for absurd-sounding ski ballet, just as it was growing in popularity, snowboarding shredded onto the scene and took its place.

Stone throw

You could describe this sport as being like a freestyle shot put, but the 1906 Greek 'stone throw' event basically involved handing competitors a heavy rock which they had to throw as far as they could in whatever way they liked.

Weighing in at about 2kg heavier than the modern male shot put ball, this was the only games which saw the 14lb stone tossed by athletes, with Greece winning the gold and bronze medals in the event, while US chucker Martin Sheridan took the silver.

Surprisingly, for what sounds like a somewhat made-up sport, some of the distances thrown at the 1906 Olympics would still be competitive in modern stone-throwing events, with gold medallist Nikolaos Georganta hitting 19.9 meters.

Solo synchronized swimming

This one is a real head scratcher. If you are by yourself, who are you swimming in synchrony with? But this is a real event and one that was a part of the more modern iteration of the Olympics.

While many of us will associate synchronized swimming with squads of dancers moving their limbs in perfect time with each other, they are following the beat and rhythm of a song. So the solo event is just that, which sounds a bit lonely.

Pigeon shooting

In sharp contrast to the practised elegance of synchronized swimming is pigeon shooting, which was more like a bloodbath than a sport. Its goal was simple: each competitor had to kill as many pigeons as they could in the time allowed.

Six birds would be released roughly 90ft from the shooting gallery, with each athlete disqualified once they missed two pigeons.

This event, thankfully, was only at the 1900 Olympics and discontinued for good reason. Nearly 300 birds were killed, with reports at the time stating that blood, feathers, and shotgun shells littered the arenas where the shoots took place.

Tug of war

Like getting rid of an event where you make Olympic swimmers try their hand at a Ninja Warrior course, the fact that tug of war is no longer in the summer games is something of a travesty.

Getting each country's biggest beefcakes to face off in a test of power and brute strength seems like the perfect Olympic sport; I genuinely want to know which part of the world produces the most immovable people.

But sadly, it only featured in five games from 1900 to 1920, when the competition was largely limited to European and some American countries. In an age before air travel, this also meant that many were unable to attend Olympic games on other continents, with it taking 10 days on a steamship just to cross the Atlantic from Britain.

Ultimately, the IOC made the decision to discontinue it to reduce the number of competitors at the games, with each nation sneakily entering multiple clubs of eight strongmen in an attempt to win the medal.