The Summer Olympics: This Is Sport?

A lot of people want to go to the Olympics, and only so many tickets are available. So to keep everybody happy, you sometimes have to stretch the definition of sport. This, no doubt, is how the Greeks came up with the pole vault. And this year offers a bounty of stupid sports to mollify the masses. Not only did I score you gymnastics tickets, you valuable client you, but they're for this year's newest Olympic sport, trampolining!

And trampolining, if you think about it, isn't even so ridiculous a sport. At least it fulfills the basic requirement of promising very serious injury. Teenage girls jump 20 ft. in the air, do tricks called the double back tuck and the full-in-full-out, and then, if the long history of backyard trampolines is any indication, fall on their faces and cry.

Jennifer Parilla, the 19-year-old who will represent all of America's hopes in Sydney, however, disappoints by saying her sport isn't really dangerous. "I've never had a backyard trampoline. They're so unsafe," she protests. Parilla insists her sport is totally legitimate. "We go over to anywhere in Europe, and our competitions are televised," she says. She obviously is not familiar with the quality of European programming.

The only trampolining televised in the U.S. is on The Man Show, which has a feature called "Girls on Trampolines" that is highly competitive in a very un-Olympic sort of way. Other than The Man Show's hosts, it's not easy to find hard-core tramp fans. Even Robert Null, Parilla's coach, offers a parsed plug. "I think after this Olympics, more kids will want to do it," he says. "I mean, it's one more way to get to the Olympics."

An eerily similar line is spun by Dan Cloppis, executive director of USA Badminton. "I mean, it's a lot easier for my children to make it to the Olympics in badminton than basketball," he says of the game he keeps referring to as "the fastest sport in the world" but that also requires him to say the word shuttlecock.

But really, the ease of getting a gold medal does not a sport make. In fact, the ease the U.S.'s Dream Team will have winning the gold again has actually turned basketball into a nonsport. A sport, after all, has to include competition, and watching Vince Carter throwing it down against the Italians just isn't that gripping.

Synchronized swimming is gripping, because it's really just soaking-wet attractive women flipping in sequined bathing suits. But as has too often been noted, it's not a sport. In fact, the sport has become so defensive since it got its Saturday Night Live lashing in the 1980s that its website, usasynchro.org has a page titled "What's Up with the Nose Clip, Hair Gel & Makeup?" Syncher Carrie Barton, 24, doesn't flinch at explaining the blue eye shadow. "The makeup enables judges to see expressions on our faces. If we're smiling during a nice piece of music or looking scary during an angry piece, that's all part of the score." Any sport in which facial expressions count seems dubious, yet, as Barton notes, "I don't think people would be so interested if we were ugly and gasping for air." And that's the main point, exemplified by U.S. synchers Kristina Lum and Heather Olson posing half-naked in this month's Maxim.