jason
05-12-2011, 09:27 AM
Pole dancing seeks an Olympic leg-up
Exotic dancers want to be part of the Games and stranger things have happened – but why don't we try superinjuncting?
Gymnastics
'Like the horizontal bar," the pole dancing petition reads, "the vertical bar should have a place in international sport'.
Having started out totally sleazy and ended up halfway respectable, pole dancing has travelled in the opposite direction to the Olympic movement. Yet the former is pushing to attract the latter's attention by most unconventional means. Out goes dead-eyed writhing to Donna Summer's She Works Hard For The Money; in comes a petition to London 2012 to feature pole dancing as a test event, with a view to it being elevated to an official Olympic sport for 2016.
Will the pole dancers succeed? If past controversies have taught us anything, it's that the best way to entice the International Olympic Committee is to stuff wads of cash into its capacious garter belt, so they are warned they may have to compromise their pole-dancing principles. At the very least they should avail themselves of a corrupt governing body so as to look the part. As for whether they should succeed, I don't see why not.
Of course, we can argue all day long about what does and does not constitute a sport, whether tennis is a sport or a game, whether it's a sport if you can have a pint and a fag while playing it, whether gymnastics is just child abuse with points, and so on. But as far as Olympic sports go, that ship has sailed. The masts of said ship are bedecked in rhythmic gymnastics ribbons, and it is crewed by beach volleyballers and the 1996 French synchronised swimming team, who had planned a routine based on the Final Solution.
For whatever reason, though, the pole dancers don't go with that line of argument. "Like the horizontal bar," their petition reads, "the vertical bar should have a place in international sport" – a piece of reasoning that exposes one of the flaws in pole dancing's perception of itself. The suspicion is that its current champions, though very skilled, aren't half as good as they think they are, in that any fifth-rate Olympic gymnast who opted to switch discipline would probably obliterate the competition.
Either way, it would be amusing to see a revival of the Olympic tradition of "demonstration sports", ditched after roller hockey got its break at Barcelona in 1992, but which had introduced a whole cavalcade of lunacies in the century or so. The 1900 Games alone boasted ballooning, fishing, and lifesaving events, while there was gliding in Berlin 1936, which so impressed the IOC that it was slated as an official sport for the 1940 Olympics. Events, alas, intervened, causing the cancellation of those Games – and that was the last the world heard of Olympic gliding. The appetite for celebrating low-flying aircraft appears to have diminished somewhat post-war.
Then there were cultural medals, another pet project of weirdo Olympics founder Baron de Coubertin. When we hosted the Games in 1948, Britain "medalled" – a styling mercifully not in use at the time – in the oils and watercolours contest. (I'm afraid France took engravings and etchings, while it was a frightfully disappointing year for reliefs, with no gold medal awarded at all).
What demonstration sports were supposed to offer the host nation, however, was the chance to big up fringe pursuits at which they were especially good – and to this end, they seem eminently worthy of revival for 2012. Binge-drinking would seem one obvious event to showcase, as would civil liberties infringement – already as much a part of the modern Olympic movement as McDonald's sponsorship and small countries doing bizarrely well in track and field. We'd be guaranteed at least a bronze, having already passed draconian laws protecting sponsors at the expense of individual freedoms (for instance, ambush marketing will be a criminal rather than civil offence), while giving not merely police, but Olympic officials, the power to enter private residences.
The really vogueish demonstration sport, though, would be superinjuncting, with Twitter currently fostering the explosion in grassroots participation. It's new, it's sexy, it's exciting – and while other countries rely on passé methods for rating athletes, Britain leads the way in this sophisticated system. Like Billy Beane's sabermetric ballplayer analysis, as detailed in Moneyball, the superinjunction programme is a far superior way of measuring which sports star is a "household name" than the mere fact of whether or not anyone has ever heard of them – resulting in a programme which has produced luminaries such as Garry Flitcroft.
So let the London organising committee declare the high court an official Olympic venue without delay. It's a tough break for the pole dancers, of course – but no one said world-class sport was going to be a cakewalk.
LINK (http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/blog/2011/may/12/pole-dancing-olympics-london-2012)
Exotic dancers want to be part of the Games and stranger things have happened – but why don't we try superinjuncting?
Gymnastics
'Like the horizontal bar," the pole dancing petition reads, "the vertical bar should have a place in international sport'.
Having started out totally sleazy and ended up halfway respectable, pole dancing has travelled in the opposite direction to the Olympic movement. Yet the former is pushing to attract the latter's attention by most unconventional means. Out goes dead-eyed writhing to Donna Summer's She Works Hard For The Money; in comes a petition to London 2012 to feature pole dancing as a test event, with a view to it being elevated to an official Olympic sport for 2016.
Will the pole dancers succeed? If past controversies have taught us anything, it's that the best way to entice the International Olympic Committee is to stuff wads of cash into its capacious garter belt, so they are warned they may have to compromise their pole-dancing principles. At the very least they should avail themselves of a corrupt governing body so as to look the part. As for whether they should succeed, I don't see why not.
Of course, we can argue all day long about what does and does not constitute a sport, whether tennis is a sport or a game, whether it's a sport if you can have a pint and a fag while playing it, whether gymnastics is just child abuse with points, and so on. But as far as Olympic sports go, that ship has sailed. The masts of said ship are bedecked in rhythmic gymnastics ribbons, and it is crewed by beach volleyballers and the 1996 French synchronised swimming team, who had planned a routine based on the Final Solution.
For whatever reason, though, the pole dancers don't go with that line of argument. "Like the horizontal bar," their petition reads, "the vertical bar should have a place in international sport" – a piece of reasoning that exposes one of the flaws in pole dancing's perception of itself. The suspicion is that its current champions, though very skilled, aren't half as good as they think they are, in that any fifth-rate Olympic gymnast who opted to switch discipline would probably obliterate the competition.
Either way, it would be amusing to see a revival of the Olympic tradition of "demonstration sports", ditched after roller hockey got its break at Barcelona in 1992, but which had introduced a whole cavalcade of lunacies in the century or so. The 1900 Games alone boasted ballooning, fishing, and lifesaving events, while there was gliding in Berlin 1936, which so impressed the IOC that it was slated as an official sport for the 1940 Olympics. Events, alas, intervened, causing the cancellation of those Games – and that was the last the world heard of Olympic gliding. The appetite for celebrating low-flying aircraft appears to have diminished somewhat post-war.
Then there were cultural medals, another pet project of weirdo Olympics founder Baron de Coubertin. When we hosted the Games in 1948, Britain "medalled" – a styling mercifully not in use at the time – in the oils and watercolours contest. (I'm afraid France took engravings and etchings, while it was a frightfully disappointing year for reliefs, with no gold medal awarded at all).
What demonstration sports were supposed to offer the host nation, however, was the chance to big up fringe pursuits at which they were especially good – and to this end, they seem eminently worthy of revival for 2012. Binge-drinking would seem one obvious event to showcase, as would civil liberties infringement – already as much a part of the modern Olympic movement as McDonald's sponsorship and small countries doing bizarrely well in track and field. We'd be guaranteed at least a bronze, having already passed draconian laws protecting sponsors at the expense of individual freedoms (for instance, ambush marketing will be a criminal rather than civil offence), while giving not merely police, but Olympic officials, the power to enter private residences.
The really vogueish demonstration sport, though, would be superinjuncting, with Twitter currently fostering the explosion in grassroots participation. It's new, it's sexy, it's exciting – and while other countries rely on passé methods for rating athletes, Britain leads the way in this sophisticated system. Like Billy Beane's sabermetric ballplayer analysis, as detailed in Moneyball, the superinjunction programme is a far superior way of measuring which sports star is a "household name" than the mere fact of whether or not anyone has ever heard of them – resulting in a programme which has produced luminaries such as Garry Flitcroft.
So let the London organising committee declare the high court an official Olympic venue without delay. It's a tough break for the pole dancers, of course – but no one said world-class sport was going to be a cakewalk.
LINK (http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/blog/2011/may/12/pole-dancing-olympics-london-2012)