spacer image
spacer image

Welcome! You're looking at an archived Snarkmarket entry. We've got a fresh look—and more new ideas every day—on the front page.

November 26, 2008

| Cranberry Sauce Recipe >>

You Get Two Guesses

Does this abstract come from The Onion or The New York Times?

Modern pentathlon has been cut from five events to four in a bid to boost its popularity and stay in the Olympics, combining shooting and running into a single event.

Nope, not satire: thing’s really happening. And the fourth/fifth event, the shoot and run, sounds awesome:

Athletes will have 70 seconds to shoot five targets, loading the gun after each shot. The best can do that in about 30 seconds. Misses will not count, but will cost valuable time. After five completed targets or 70 seconds, whether all the targets were hit or not, athletes will run one kilometer, or about 0.62 miles, returning to the shooting range.

They will complete that cycle three times, running across the finish line to end the competition.

Those who were good at shooting may not be so good when out of breath. Those who excelled at the running portion may lose their advantage by the start-and-stop addition of the shooting. Some athletes will change guns, because loading quickly is suddenly critical.

It sounds a little like my favorite event from the Winter Olympics, the biathalon, which combines target shooting with cross-country skiing. But if there is really a demand for a shoot-and-run event, shouldn’t that be its own thing? Like, um, the biathalon? It’s strange to invent a new olympic activity for a multi-event sport.

Tim-sig.gif
Posted November 26, 2008 at 7:45 | Comments (2) | Permasnark
File under: Briefly Noted, Gleeful Miscellany

Comments

This is a pretty good commentary on the "pentathlon" thing - http://forthright.livejournal.com/287640.html

Boo (to the link above). I am all about fallacies, but the etymological fallacy is only a fallacy when talking about words whose meaning is determined by a history of living use within the culture, not by an Olympic board. When we use language to decide what terms mean explicitly by fiat, we expect those terms to make sense. Twenty-five years ago, the womens' pentathlon added two events, and they changed the name to the heptathlon. And all of the other various "n-athlons" either combine all of their events (like the biathlon and triathlon) or stage them all separately (like the decathlon, hepathlon, and current modern pentathlon). I think a biathlon + three events is a very strange structure, regardless of whether or not it could still be considered a pentathlon.

spacer image
spacer image