30 greatest one-time sports in Summer Olympics history

13. Pistol Dueling
1908 London Olympics

This sounds like an event that would have happened at the 1900 Olympics, but eight years later, the wild events returned. The event started at the 1906 Intercalated Games, where shooters would fire bullets at plaster dummies from either 20 or 30 meters away. Things took a very strange turn when it was added to the 1908 Olympics. The shooters now had another person on the other side, not a plaster dummy.

Shooters would wear protective gear and would shoot wax bullets at each other. The gear would protect their face, torso, and hands. It just feels like there’s so many other parts of the body the gear should protect, but we digress. The guns had to be kept cold to make this event work, which is famously hard to do. If the barrel stayed hot, the wax bullets would melt and fail to shoot. 

An actual quote to explain the “dual” was that they would have “enough risk in these duels to make them exciting, though not really dangerous.” No thank you. While in history, this is looked at the same way we looked at demonstration sports, this one was more of an invite-only event that coincided with the Olympics. It definitely wasn’t “official,” but it was meant to be scheduled at this time and in this place so it felt like an Olympic event. 

Official or not official, the objective was to make this look like an Olympic event. It took place on the fencing courts. Demonstration sports didn’t officially become a part of the Olympics until 1912, so this would likely fall under that if it had existed in London.