Olympic 29: Modern Pentathlon

August 11, 2012

Well, here we are, Sport # 29 of the 29 Olympic sports, modern pentathlon. I watched the fencing part of the competition on the final Saturday of the Olympics and all I can say is that this sport is insane.

The whole sport of modern pentathlon is a loose adaptation of the ancient Greek discipline of the pentathlon, a sport not dissimilar to today’s decathlon and heptathlon. I say “loose” because when Baron Pierre de Coupertin came up with the sport, he based it on a specific premise of a 19th-century soldier trapped behind enemy lines and forced to duel, swim, ride, run and shoot to survive.

This is accomplished at the London Games through a fencing portion, where the athletes are required to compete against every other athlete in the field with epee swords and the first touch wins the fight, a slightly more conventional swimming portion, a riding/equestrian portion, where the athletes have all of 20 minutes to familiarize themselves with their assigned horses and a running/shooting portion, where the athletes run a given distance, stop and shoot a select amount of targets from their laser guns, run again, and then shoot again.

It’s not the kind of sport that lends itself to start-to-finish watching; the event used to last for multiple days and now that it’s only a one-day event, it still takes the better part of a day to complete. And given that the sport barely survived an attempt to remove it from the Olympic program a couple years ago, there’s a good chance we won’t see it at Rio De Janeiro in 2016 or in 2020. But at least it’s certainly not boring. I’m still not sure where they came up with the laser guns idea, though.