Freestyle Football as an Olympic Sport? Here’s how it is possible.
A number of debates have been made on this topic before. Is freestyle football capable to qualify as an Olympic sport?
If you are reading this article further I am assuming that you have a basic knowledge of what freestyle football is and how the competition system in freestyle football works.
If not watch this video to know what a normal freestyle football competition looks like.
Now the nature of these competitions is such that it prevents itself to qualify as an official sporting event. The decisions made are purely based on human intention and have a an equivalent chance of being wrong or even biased.
Of course there are other sports in Olympics(gymnastics, equestrian, figure skating etc) which are judged on human decisions but they are too subjective to be compared with freestyle football. The basis of criteria for judging in freestyle football is not an easy task and definitely can be condensed down to a single format rule which will be excepted universally.
Okay! The above para was inspired by Stephen Gray. Check out his article which showed why it is not possible for freestyle football to become an Olympic sport.
PROBLEMS. Problems. problems!
What is the solution man ?
You told you would have it. Give it to us !!
Hold on people. Have patience. We are slowly getting to the good part now.
So far all I have done is written the difficulties that have prevented freestyle football to coming even close to being an Olympic sport. And I also posted a photo of Michryc for no reason.
Now here’s where my thought process goes a little nuts.
Olympic games demands the sport to be of a nature where the judging and point system/systems is not a biased one and also technically sound. So in my opinion some of the ways that this can be carried out is-
- Routine/Group routine — Well, this is the simplest form in which you can present freestyle football to the world. The setup of the competition would be similar to figure skating where points are given on various aspects of the performance. It is a process where neither the creativity of a freestyle football athlete will get hampered nor his technical ability.
The problem — Again the deciding of criteria and rewarding of points could be contested. Also then Gautier would win all the tournaments!
- Sick 3 — Not the best idea but it provides us the most definite way of selecting a winner. However it will be limited only to lower body specialists and hence a bad choice.
- Challenge — Similar as the above. The deciding of winner is easier but way too biased in favor of lower body specialists.
- Long combos in all categories — This was something that has not been attempted as a competition much. By long combos I do not only mean only lower combos but also upper or sit down long combos. A competition not necessarily in the format of Iron Man competition but also using criteria which award the difficult tricks in combos more points than the easier ones. For example — a NT combo would be of more points than a simple 2 revolution combo and things like that.
Again this would not allow creativity to flourish in the system, but sometimes you have to lose something in order to gain something.
The idea of a routine/group routine is probably the most close to being successful if the various criteria for point system could be established and universally accepted.
Anyways, this was just a thought process which can be completely ignored by you if you want(to be that kind of person). However I think ideas like these are necessary if we want to reach somewhere.
The start of something great is always done by something foolish.
