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MILAN — You'll get to watch 16 different sports — including multiple kinds of skating, skiing and snowboarding — over the course of these Winter Games. But, just for a moment, let's take a look at some of the onetime Olympic sports you won't be seeing: dog sledding, ski ballet and more.
Many of those were demonstration or exhibition sports held to promote a particular sport.Olympic historian Bill Mallon says the practice started at the first Winter Olympics in 1924, and really became a fixture in the wake of World War II.
"There were sort of two demonstration sports at most Olympics: one of which was usually a sport that was sort of specific to the host country that wasn't on the program yet, and the other one was a sport that the [International Olympic Committee] were sort of trialing to see if they could get it on the Olympic program," he explains.
Demonstration sports went away after 1992, which was also the last time a summer and winter Games were held in the same year.
Some of today's best-known Winter Olympic events, like curling and women's speed skating, started as demonstration sports (both in Lake Placid in 1932). But many others didn't make it to a second Games.
The task of adding — and removing — sports from the Olympics falls mainly to the International Olympic Committee (IOC). It requires new sports to meet certain guidelines (like following anti-doping rules and offering both men's and women's events), while also factoring in things like cost, viewership and youth appeal. That explains why newer Olympic sports have included breakdancing, surfing and skateboarding.
"Every sport wants to be on the Olympic program because that kind of brings them some prestige," Mallon says. "And, in a lot of countries, funding for sports is done by whether or not they're Olympic sports."
The IOC can choose to drop an Olympic sport due to logistical considerations like the cost and strain on the host city, as well as dwindling viewership and participation in the sport itself. That happened at the 1960 Winter Games in Squaw Valley, Calif., when organizers decided not to build a bobsleigh track and dropped the sport — for the first and only time in Winter Olympics history. The event returned at the very next Winter Games: 1964 in Innsbruck, Austria.
These days, Winter Games have only about half the number of events as Summer Games, over the same span of time. Mallon would like to see that change with the addition of some more winter sports — including the return of the former demonstration sports of sled dog racing and skijoring.
Here's a look at those some of the sports from Winter Games past:
Military patrol, a mix of cross-country skiing and rifle shooting, was part of the first Winter Olympics in Chamonix, France, in 1924. Teams of four, including one "officer," competed as a unit in a ski race of more than 18 miles. Then the three non-officer members of each team participated in a target shooting contest, in which every successful hit knocked 30 seconds off their race time. Military patrol stayed on the Olympic roster in 1928 and 1936, but was demoted to a demonstration sport in 1948 and fell off after that. But if you're intrigued by the mashup of skiing and shooting, tune into its modern successor, the biathlon, which made its debut in 1960.
Skijoring — in which an athlete on skis is towed by holding onto the reins of either horses, ponies or dogs — was one of the first Olympic demonstration sports in St. Moritz in 1928, when horses pulled the athletes across a frozen lake, and Sweden swept the podium. The Scandinavian sport, which translates roughly to "ski driving" in Norwegian, has been described as a rodeo-meets-ski race. While it didn't stick around as an Olympic sport, it's still in fashion now especially in Western states like Wyoming, Colorado and Utah — and sometimes involves snowmobiles instead of horses.
Dog sled, once a form of transportation, got its Olympic run at the 1932 Games in Lake Placid in a nod to the sport's North American roots. Thirteen top U.S. and Canadian mushers raced the 25-mile course over two days of heats, according to the official account. Crowds gathered to watch the dogs cross the finish line, some particularly exhausted ones riding on their owners' sleds rather than pulling them. The sport didn't stick around in the Olympics, but has its own major long-distance competitions every year, including the Iditarod and Yukon Quest.
Bandy is an ancient sport in the hockey family, kind of like field hockey on skates. Depicted in cave paintings in Egypt roughly 4,000 years ago, the modern form of the sport was being played in England in the 1800s. In bandy, athletes on ice skates use curved sticks to try to shoot a small ball (not a puck) into the other team's net. Bandy had a turn as a demonstration sport in the 1952 Oslo Games. Three years later, the Soviet Union, Finland, Norway and Sweden formed the International Bandy Federation. European countries still dominate the sport today, though it does have a footprint in the U.S., particularly in Minnesota.
Ski ballet, aka "acroski," in many ways more closely resembled figure skating than skiing: set to music, scored by judges and heavy on flips, spins, footwork and fashion. It was a type of freestyle skiing — which itself used to be called "hot dogging" — that emerged from the free-flowing U.S. counterculture movement of the 1960s and '70s. Ski ballet appeared as an Olympic demonstration sport in 1988 and 1992. Its popularity — and international competition — fizzled out by the end of the millennium, but its creative legacy lives on in other Olympic freestyle skiing disciplines like slopestyle and big air.
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