Saturday, March 18, 2017

How Can You Really Call Yourself a Grand Prix Skier Without Horses

When you do a ski jump out in Colorado, it may be a horse which tows you to the leap.


The French judge or at least the one from Des Moines gives the jumper a score of 8.5.  (The Telegraph:  Horse-powered ski jumping? Only in America)


Anything this ridiculous seems like you can tag immediately to America but they didn't invent it; they only made it even more ridiculously dangerous.  Scandinavians started doing this on frozen lakes in 1922.


Maybe you're familiar with buggy racing and, in this way, the human can be the buggy.  There are more bad puns in this sport than on a tv talk show.


They call the sport skijoring and I might have missed this one in my own review of the Wide World of Sports.  Jim McKay never showed us this one but he did show us curling, the most ridiculous non-dangerous sport in the world, so I'm sure he would have done it if he had known about it.

Note:  curling is ridiculous but I still think it's cool to watch.  Humans are the most fun when we're being ridiculous.


This one definitely goes down as 'only in America:'


Check out Annie Oakley on the horse.


Part of the coolness in this, well, if there is any coolness in it is the horses can handle it down on the plains and also up in snow country which shows a highly-cool, wide-ranging animal.  I'll not likely ever be buds with a horse but I've been learning in recent years why so many people live for that.  The ski jumpers probably won't but hopefully the rest of us will.


Marginally-relevant side-note:  maybe you recall the Agony of Defeat in "Wide World of Sports" who was a ski jumper who absolutely obliterated himself on a world-class competition ski jump.  It looked like there wouldn't be enough left of the skier for hors d'oeuvres but, in fact, he lived.


Thanks to Yevette for this one.

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