30 greatest one-time sports in Summer Olympics history

28. Motorcycle Racing
1900 Paris Olympics

The 1900 Summer Olympics in Paris, France will always be known as the Olympics where the committee threw everything at the wall to see what stuck. It was just the second Olympic Games since returning for the modern era. The first was a wild success, but there were only nine sports represented. And many of these sports only lasted one year, so expect to see them a lot on this list.

We start with motorcycle racing because this just seems wild, but we wouldn’t hate it if the IOC changed the rules to bring it back (motorized sports were outlawed entirely in later years). This sport had two events. Both were one-mile races that took place in… the USA? We told you there were weird details about those early Olympic Games. 

Again, we’re not entirely sure what was “official” or not, but we’re keeping this on the list for now. Just thinking about how we see motorcycling racing now, and equating that to 1900s motorcycles is incredibly fun.

There’s also a loose record of multiple other racing events at the World’s Fair that the IOC recognized. French racers won most of the events, but the one event an American won was fire truck racing, which sounds insane. There was also a record of taxi racing and delivery van racing, but history is pretty spotty.