30 greatest one-time sports in Summer Olympics history

It’s one of the best times to be a sports fan: the Summer Olympics. It’s a time when the world is watching. This year’s Super Bowl had around 123.7 million US viewers and around 62.5 million international viewers. The World Cup Final brought around 1.5 billion viewers. The 2021 Olympics in Tokyo had an estimated 3 BILLION viewers. There is no doubt what the most popular sporting event is on this planet.

Of course, there are popular sports like gymnastics, track and field, and basketball, but there are always some obscure sports like breaking (better known as break dancing), table tennis, and trampoline. We like to see all of the sports. 

However, sometimes, sports tend to disappear. Sometimes, they are long-standing sports that have overstayed their welcome or are no longer relevant in the 21st century. Other times, they were given one shot to prove they were a worthwhile sport, but it ended before it began. There are some of the most famous sports in the world on this list, and there are others that need a little explaining. Still, we ranked our 30 favorites. 

Which is the best one-time Olympic sport ahead of the 2024 Paris Olympics?

30. Aeronautics
1936 Berlin Olympics

This one is almost cheating because this event didn’t technically take place at the Summer Olympics, but the Olympic Committee counted this as an event in 1936 despite it not happening that year. The gold medalist was awarded at the closing ceremonies, and there was no silver or bronze medal. However, the actual act sounds amazing. 

Swiss pilot Hermann Schreiber won the medal for being the first person ever to fly a motorized glider over the Swiss Alps. The Olympics were in Berlin, Germany, so performing the event possible as much as a year earlier in an entirely different country was a strange choice. But a gold medal is a gold medal. (NOTE: There are some strange intricacies with these early Olympic Games.)

There were still Aeronautics at the Berlin Games, including the Hindenburg flyover and the introduction of the Messerschmitt Bf 109, a German fighter jet that changed the way these jets were created in the future. But all of the events outside this one gold medal were considered “demonstration events.”

The Olympic Committee had the option to award an Aeronautics medal at subsequent Olympics until the 1940s when the medal was officially discontinued.