SkillOlympics

Contests in skills for modern life

The problem. Modern Olympic sports focus on the skills of the warrior and hunter - the running and leaping and throwing and hitting, the records for going fast and high and far and hard, and for teams like hunting bands. These skills were needed for ancient Greece. What skills beyond healthy exercise for everyone are more needed for elites today?

A solution -SkillOlympics

Modern Skill events such as sheep-shearing and timber-cutting could nto be great spectator sports before TV. But TV can make now great spectator sport out of many skills needed for modern life, not just for ancient Greece. SkillOlympics would make marvellous TV. A videocamera can pick up every detail of the skills of a movement, play it slow, edit a sequence and summarise it, and show people racing neck and neck who may not even be in the same stadium or studio.

Events for SkillOlympics:

Almost any skill can be developed for Skill-Olympics if a club can organise to arrange events. Weeding, cartooning, dishwashing tested against machines, skilful safe-driving, packing lunches, floor-cleaning, mending and patching, crochet, ditch-digging, reading and remembering a book, hairdressing, taking a dog for a run, bricklaying, monster jigsaws, tree-climbing, counter-checkout, shop-window-displays with materials given, impromptu verse, recitation, gift-wrapping, ditch-digging, toddler-training, thistle-slashing, blackberry-destroying, manual lawnmowing, reading to toddlers, DIY carpentry, carpet cleaning, getting babies to sleep with lullabies, getting correct change from a purseful of coins, - and at the end of the event, your home or workplace can be far better than it was before!

SkillOlympics events need not be limited to international events. Each country can bring entrants for its own cultural special skills - such as carving in wood or stone, graffiti, basket-making, cuisine, origami, elaborate hair-dressing, embroidered jackets, inventing novelties, calligraphy, yodeling, singing lullabies.

Some of the old Greek Olympian contests in poetry and drama and music were dropped when Olympics were revived because modern Olympics could focus only on what can be seen from a distance, dramatically, by enormous audiences. They required scores that can be objectively measured or timed. But since they can now be shown in detail by television cameras and judged by television panels, these ancient competitions could also be reinstated as international SkillOlympic events.

Advantages of SkillOlympics.

Panels of judges can rate subjective features like quality of product and grace of movement, and a common final judgement is blazoned at the touch of a computer key.