The Olympics have added four new winter sports, is snowball fights next?

The Olympics are about to get a little more exciting!

(I know it’s summer in Canada, so I won’t talk about the winter games too much)

The IOC announced today that four new events will debut at the 2018 winter games in Pyeongchang, South Korea. Sadly, none of them are snowball fights. Which is actually a sport in places like Japan.

The four new events are:

Big Air in snowboarding:

Mass start in speed skating:

Mixed doubles in curling:

and Team skiing event (teams of two men and two women competing in parallel slalom races).

The reason for new the events are a strategic effort to get more people, specifically younger people, more excited about the games. “The changes reflect the continued evolution of the Winter Olympic program and build on the success of recent editions of the games. They also build on the reforms outlined in Olympic Agenda 2020 which aim to create more flexibility into the Olympic program of the Olympic Games.”

I’m not sports expert, but these all seem like great additions. Adding curling, especially in places where they garner big ratings like Canada is a no brainer.  The arenas are already built, why not try to make some more money off of them.

And the big air snowboarding as been a popular sport at the XGames for years, and if the Olympics are interested in garnering younger viewers, they have to go after the XGames crowd.

But seriously, can we got back to the snowball fights for a second?  If the IOC wants to rock the winter sports world, they would institute competition ASAP.  Over the past couple of years, there have been full on yukigassen (snow battle) tournaments all over the world including Japan, Finland, Norway, Australia, Alaska, Jasper, Saskatoon and Russia.

Actually, I refereed a few games at the tournament in Jasper and it was awesome!

And yes, I’m mostly proposing this because we know Canadians would easily medal in this sport, we have eight months of year to train in our backyards.