It seems just days ago, media outlets like Yahoo were reporting, blogging, and occasionally making light of the fact that Michael Phelps, then expected to win his 22nd Olympic medal, would have as many Olympic medals as India has won in its entire history! And 1.2 billion people live there! Then along came India Badminton player Saina Nehwal, who won a bronze medal, giving India 23 medals before Phelps swam to his 22nd and final medal later the same day, teaching some other bloggers a lesson about avoiding premature e-joke-elation!
Also congratulations, India, as you wait to see whether boxer Mary Kom, who is guaranteed at least a bronze medal, wins the gold today!
That said, we suspect India might win even more medals if somebody brought cricket back to the Olympics, as we hear that cricket is very popular in India (and India is the current World Cup Of Cricket Champions after a 2011 World Cup victory). So, let’s face it, India, you have one-sixth of the world’s population, you should get a major vote as to which events are at the Olympics representing “world” sports (and you might want to vote for the sport you are currently the reigning world champions).
Sure, readers who aren’t cricket fans may say – “Cricket – doesn’t that take five days or something per match to play?” Let’s look in the rule book, formerly known as Wikipedia:
‘In the traditional form of the game, if the time allotted for the match expires before either side can win, then the game is declared a draw… [But] If this [other] kind of match is temporarily interrupted by bad weather, then a complex mathematical formula, known as the Duckworth-Lewis method after its developers, is often used to recalculate a new target score.’
“Huh? Five days could lead to a draw or complex mathematics?” the cricket sceptics might conclude, “With these kind of timing rules, our sand-timer in Scattergories, which we use for all competitive events,would break down into tears of grainy sand! How can the Olympic Committee squeeze 20,000 hours of one sport and math into a 17-day Olympiad?”
3 Lengthier Events Than Cricket That Could Be Added To The Olympics
1. The card game war. After six hours of playing this game as a kid in the backseat of your parents’ car with your little sister, you thought you had the victory locked up with 50 cards in your hand! Until your sister beat one of your twos with a three, drawing the game out for many more hours, as your parents drove from New York to Atlantic City to play the card game war that just bored you for hours, in a casino. Meanwhile, your seven year-old genius brother read university statistics books in the backseat, telling you the probability of this game ever ending is still higher than your parents making money playing it in the casino, where unlike a real war, a tie goes to the house!
2. Cruise-ship racing. Anyone who has seen the movie Speed 2: Cruise Control know how exciting that can be. To really shake things up, you could have an event of playing the card game war in the ship’s casino while racing to Monte Carlo.
3. College-undergraduate-degree-earning. Hey, if they’re going to have the summer Olympics every four years, why not add an event that takes four years to complete? Of course, there will be seven-year old math geniuses from all around the world who can earn an entire degree faster than their brother and sister finish that game of war in the backseat of their parents’ car. The good news is these seven-year-old math geniuses will be able to quickly use the Duckworth-Lewis method to announce who won the cricket match, if the sport returns to the Olympics.