I did a microtalk this week at Hide & Seek’s Weekender event! On, erm.. the Monday. They asked me to do something about the Olympics, and this is what I came up with.
Jerry Carpenter did some drawings for me. You should check out his other stuff, and follow him on Twitter! (and me for that matter)..
I generally favour team sports – I watched mostly Hockey, Volleyball and Water Polo at the London games. But I was watching the running relays in the Track and Field finals, and it occured to me that relays are an interesting mechanic – the idea of a team of athletes working together to achieve a goal, but where only one is actually competing at any one time – perhaps with some overlap.
I started to wonder whether you could apply the relay mechanic to other Olympic sports, and figured you probably could. These are the five I presented, but I bet there are loads more interesting possibilities
Relay High Diving
Each diver makes their dive, scoring points in the usual way. When they enter the water, they have to swim to the bottom, to retrieve one of those black rubber bricks that you only get in life-saving classes. They then have to clamber out of the pool and run with their brick to the top of the high board as quickly as possible, and tag the next diver. Each diver is scored for their dive in the usual way, but additional points are awarded based on the total time and combined weight of bricks they choose (there is a choice of different weight bricks at the bottom of the pool).
Relay Archery
This event is a race: the aim being to cover a distance of 10,000m with a shared arrow as quickly as possible. All four team members start together. The first fires the first arrow, and they all run after it, bows strapped to their backs like in the Hunger Games. When the second team member reaches the first arrow, they then fire it; and everyone else keeps running. When it’s their turn to fire, each archer can stop to fire additional ‘secondary’ (blunt) arrows at their opponents: each direct hit costs that team a 5 second penalty (but they must catch up before its their turn to fire again or everyone has to wait).
Bennett Foddy (who did an excellent talk about how much he enjoys the human misery of the Oympics) suggested an alternative for this event, whereby arrows must be caught in mid-air by another team member before the firing point moves up. So non-firing players would be able to run away from the current archer – and adjust their distance from the archer based on how confident they were of shot accuracy and catching skills.
And Dick Hogg suggested another alternative, where a target must be hit, but that target is moveable (but heavy) and must be carried by the 3 non-firing players at any one time.
Relay Canoeing
One person per canoe. At each marker they have to do a barrel roll, and swap rowers. Simple. I originally had the idea that the other rowers would have to wait underwater wearing snorkels, but I actually prefer Jerry’s version where they have to execute a dive from a buoy. My mum who used to teach canoeing – plus some people in the audience – said that the changeover in this event would be practically impossible, but I don’t feel like that attitude is really in the Olympic spirit.
Relay Weightlifting
Each weightlifter has to pass the weight up to another weightlifters on a successively higher platform, then back down again without anyone dying. Other than that, the usual weightlifting rules apply.
Relay Boxing
This one’s a bit weird, but bear with me.. It takes place in a ring divided into 4 quadrants, each with 2 boxers fighting one another (so 4 separate fights happening simultaneously). The usual rules of scoring apply – you get points for landing hits on your opponent: the catch is that only one boxer per team is allowed to be scoring points at any time. Boxers must bump right gloves with a teammate to nominate a new ‘scorer’, or left gloves to swap quadrants / opponents with a teammate. So although each boxer is only ever fighting one opponent, there is plenty of switching around. This sport would require 16 referees and the commentary would be incredible!
