Ridiculympics

When it comes to the wide world of sports, no place is so lofty—no athlete so honored—than at the Olympic Games. So how the heck did these competitions get to be part of the Olympics?

This is the idea that any competition or game, no matter how silly, fantastic, or non-athletic, can be an Olympic Sport. And each may have their own teams, sponsors, and leagues, despite minor technicalities like not being scorable or not based on skill. The most egregious examples may even be Fictional Sports or Wacky Racing.

Since it includes all parodies of the Olympics it's typically Played for Laughs, but it can also be used to help build a fantastic setting. For example, a Science Fiction story could have a zero-G relay race at the Olympic Games In Space

This is also Truth in Television, because many sufficiently motivated groups have gotten their sports and games included in the Olympics and are now considered a normal part of the competition. See the Real Life section below for examples such as contract bridge and sculpture, which were past competitions or seriously considered competitions.

For weird sports that aren't part of the Olympics, compare Fictional Sport, Gladiator Games, Cooking Duel, Wacky Racing, Calvin Ball, and Game Show Appearance.

Examples of Ridiculympics include:

Comic Books

• An early Judge Dredd strip takes place during the first Lunar Olympics. Athletes are allowed to compete with bionic implants, provided that no less than 80% of their bodies is made of human tissue. Because of the moon's lower gravity, Earth records in events like the pole vault and the shot put are broken like crazy. There are also a few "Moon Sports" introduced, notably one best described as "snowboarding tricks meets the ski jump"; overshooting ones run and missing the safety net leads to some very bloody, deadly results.

Live Action TV

• A "Weekend Update" segment on Saturday Night Live once reported on the first All-Drug Olympics that allows (and even encourages) athletes "to take any substance whatsoever before, after, or even during the competition." By the time Weekend Update begins its coverage, 115 world records had already been "shattered".
  • SNL/The Lonely Island's Digital Short "Space Olympics" is a song about the Olympics Recycled in Space, except it's really about the logistical problems therein.

Attention, all athletes. There are minor scheduling adjustments.
Space Disk! Is totally canceled.
Space Swords! Is totally canceled.
Space Luge! Is also canceled.
And all other events are pending!

• Thirty Rock has Olympic Tetherball, amongst others. It turns out that the US made up a lot of Olympic events so they could pretend to win them and help national morale.
• Monty Python's Flying Circus had the finals of the Olympic Hide-And-Seek. A special airing in Austria had the Silly Olympics which included events such as the cross-country race for incontinent people and the 50-meter dash for people with no sense of direction.
• The Goodies epsisode "A Kick in the Arts had Tim converting the Olympics from sports alone to a combination of sports and arts, leading to such events as the 'Snatch and Limerick' (combining poetry and weightlifting).
• Mystery Science Theater 3000; while watching the Russo-Finnish film "Jack Frost", Crow observed, "If dwarf hide-and-seek were in the Olympics, Finland would be in great shape."

Video Games

• Numen Olympics, olympic events by genetically enhanced superior people One event was seeing how many times you could jump off walls between apartment buildings to reach the top, or sprinting faster than 60 miles per hour.
• An NES era game called Caveman Games, based off of the C64 and IBM PC game Ugh-lympics featured a series of different events like pole vaulting over a T-rex, building a fire, clubbing your opponent into submission, and outrunning your opponent so you don't get eaten by a saber tooth tiger.

Web Original

• One Strong Bad Email from Homestar Runner was actually about the "Strong Badathalon", with events such as "Greco-Roman Homestar Crud-Out-Of-Beating", the "Clean and Jerk Strong Mad's Underwears Over His Head" ("fortunately, you don't really have to clean them") and "Probably Something with Guitars, Lasers, Robots, and Hot Girls".

Western Animation

• Scooby Doo's Laff-A-Lympics ran on this trope. Every competition was some strange game.
• The Fry Cook games in SpongeBob SquarePants included events such as patty throwing, artistic ice cream diving, bun wrestling...
• One Care Bears episode involved the Care-A-Lot Games, which consisted of such events as the piggyback race, limbo, the egg spoon race, and paddle ball. Much Hilarity Ensues when Mr. Beastly tries to cheat at every single event he participates in (his screwup with the paddle ball stops just short of destroying the entire stadium).
• Animalympics, being a special about animals competing in the Olympics, is fundamentally based on this trope.
• The Olympics in Futurama have tended to have some strange events, notably, the "limbo" races, in which the runners must limbo under the hurdles as they go along. The robot Olympics have a series of "bending" competitions featuring versions of existing Olympics sports altered to include, well, bending.

Real Life

• The modern Olympic Games had art competitions in its early days. The categories were architecture, literature, music, painting, and sculpture. Oh, and the artworks had have to do with sports thematically.