It used to be average people participating in the olympics, a long long time ago. before sports medicine and state investment.
this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2026
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Ok, but give them 1 year and a salary to train, make every event into Cool Runnings.
Also only allow 26 year olds so we have a level playing field.
I'd love this. There'd be a lot of great stories about the training and everything leading up to the event.
The montage of each athlete from start to game day would be so much more impressive. I don't sports betting, but I'd absolutely start the day the athletes are selected.
As funny as Peter Thiel's Steroid Games would be, seeing regular ass people become somewhat good at a thing is more interesting than seeing a 1-in-100million freak of nature do something even further beyond my own experience than what pro athletes already do.
Steroid games sounds disgusting. I'm not surprised to learn that Thiel is one of those guys that is into steroid freaks. Yuck. It is horrible for the people taking them, and gives them lifelong problems, like those poor woman the Stasi in East Germany were tasked with doping without their knowledge to win in olympic competitions, swim team I think idk if others too, during the cold war.
Just awful, they might still be around, normally I support the right to use drugs, but anabolic steroids are just awful and have few if any legitimate uses.
I'd be a bit more interesting if they only got a month or two to train - if it's a year then they ought to get pretty good (too good)
If you don’t give them enough time to train then this wouldn’t be as interesting as you think it’d just be a lot of injuries
A year gives them a chance to actually condition themselves. Anybody can achieve that transformation or something close with dedication. A month though, and even the best training in the world isn't going to make up the difference between a randomly selected athletic and nonathletic person.
But the point is that it is your average joe that hasn't trained to see how the average person would fare.
The average Joe can go try random sports today. You can even watch people try new things for the first time.
The point is to inspire people by showing what dedication and support can do to elevate Average Joe.
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This is almost the plot of The Hunger Games.
no murder tho
yet
(and the hunger games is similar to the japanese movie "battle royale", famously liked by feet lover quentin tarantino, probably just because he can point to it as stupid trivia about where the battle royale genre comes from, the same thing I'm doing now)
No intentional murder, but I assume that if grandma gets drafted into the ski jump or if random untrained people like Dale the electrician are pitted against each other in Olympic fencing, boxing, or rugby, there are going to be a few deaths.
At PAX, the Penny Arcade Expo, a large video game convention, they have an event called The Omegathon where random attendees play a series of video games to decide who is the best.
When the event has proper commentators, it is the best thing at PAX.
(Unfortunately, most of the time, the person with the mic barely commentates and doesn't even tell the audience which competitor is on which screen, which sort of ruins it for spectators.)
Pro athletes weren't (officially) allowed to compete in the Olympics until 1988
The long term university students with golden long term "scholarships" in the US, the Soviet soldiers with unlimited hours for their "hobby", and the legion of public employees in European countries that went for 8 hours runs before "work" were 100% not professional athletes.
8 hours runs before "work"
This would get me to actually sit through a meeting, but at what price?
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there's a huge difference between collegiate and non-paid athletics and dale in the example above.
announcer: it seems that Russia has randomly selected their 3 time gold medal athlete again to compete! how lucky!
No problem, we can just put all birth certificates, death certificates, and government-issued ID (front and back) on the blockchain to ensure randomness.
How would that work? I mean the blockchain part, not the personal information of 8 billion people in the hands of few people part.
you base the random dice roll on the proof of work of the block chain. proofs of work generate randomness because (proof by contradiction) if they didn't it would be easy to find the next block and make a bunch of money.
EDIT: more concretely, in a blockchain, "miners" compute a "hash" of the chain up to the latest block, with an extra random "nonce". they then check if this hash has a certain distinguishing feature (eg 5 leading zeros). if it doesn't have this feature, the recompute the hash with a new nonce. the rest of the bits in the hash thus become random. thus, if you commit to using a future hash to determine your lottery, it can be guaranteed to be random (or prove you have enough money to manipulate the block chain which is very difficult)
does this need to be done 8 billion times or just for the number of olympic participants? I guess this is a resource question.
just for the number of participants. and there's a construction (a pseudorandom generator) thatll let you do it with one block
I'd pick random amateur athletes of the sport. Gymnastics in particular seems kinda dangerous if you have never trained it somewhat seriously. The gap between mildly talented amateur athletes and world elite athletes should usually still be gigantic.
IDK, I want to see the interview with Dale after he puts on skis for the first tine, but before he does the ski jump.
"I can see you have put the skis on backwards. It's this a secret technique that you stumbled upon?"
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Nah nah I want to see Dave from accounting try out Big Air snowboarding
My surprise is that this isn’t a common thing from the TV network. It would be fairly simple to do a “virtual” overlay of some average Joe running on the same track from previous years, and individual sports would be even easier to do featurettes.
I’d lean toward two people being featured. An average Joe male and a decathlete female or some such. There are some events that even an average man would crush, but seeing the woman beat the guy consistently would also be kind of fun.
What events do you reckon an average Joe would crush? I'm struggling to think of one.
Mental gymnastics of course.
I think they mean relative to a woman, so basically anything where strength is a major factor. I think they specified decathlon athlete for women so they'd be on more equal footing.
Testosterone is a hell of a drug. For example, my wife is friends with a female powerlifter. While I do work out, it's not really with any sort of consistency and I never focus on raw strength. Her second place winning squat max was my 12RM.
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I've been trying to defend this idea in my friend group for years! Let's call it the normalympics, and treat it like half a reality show half a sport competition. I want to see an middle age accountant learn pole vaulting each weekend during one year.
that would indeed be fascinating, i'd watch it
gives you a sense of what's actually going on in the country, how are the people doing
I've said this for years. Make it like The Price is Right and just call people down from the stands to do the 110m hurdles.
Seeing somebody train their entire life and have the perfect genetics for something isn't encouraging normal people to have a go. I want to see a fat builder doing the triple jump for a cash prize.
I was always bored of seeing "the best" to do his thing. Sure it's interesting for a few seconds to see someone go absolutely nuts on a yo-yo, but then it's just noise. And the next one who is the "second best" just does the same thing again, but idk, his string has less tension or some shit.
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39 Year old Electrician Dale walks across it without any issue. You see, it's just like one of his jobs that someone else engineered from a desk without ever seeing that the job is impossible. But, Dale is the man who pulls it off by crossing narrow trusses carrying tools and the new equipment, while his assistant watches from below rethinking his career knowing Dale's the man he's going to have to replace in the next 10-15 years.
I would 100% watch that
I love it. Lets fine tune.
Alcoholicorn said
give them 1 year and a salary to train, make every event into Cool Runnings. Also only allow 26 year olds so we have a level playing field.
That would lead to doping abuse and then we'd have to do tons of checks for a year.
But how about:
- give them only weeks to train, but on site.
- have a lottery group of 10 per country, allowing only 3 to compete. That would even it out a tiny bit.
- the 7 none-competitors are still given responsibilities on the team. As supporters, coaches, spokespeople, crew, ... idk managers, etc. I wanna see what the teams come up with. Do they sell merch? Do they provide buses to get fans to cheer at the event? Do they serve their athletes to their best performance?
- everybody is given the same fixed salary separately, though
- ah yes and everybody must see the same doctors provided by the Lottery Olympics Committee. Not someone hidden or bribe-able
Then during the weeks on site there is an entire media team providing insights, doing interviews, shows and whatnot. And a reality tv show or whatever the kids are watching these days.
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This is legit an SNL ski. I think they did it for figure skating.
I vote yes!
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