One of the attractions of watching the Olympics is getting sucked into and learning about sports you’ve barely heard of before. The Paralympic Games are just around the corner, with exciting sports including wheelchair rugby and goalball, a game for people who are blind or vision impaired, where the object is for players to stay on their hands and knees and throw a ball past opponents into their net to score.
If you still find yourself jonesing for more athletic novelty after that, there are plenty of events even farther out on the fringe than the ones contested in Paris. Many are played in small contests across the country, or can be found in the darker corners of sports broadcasters’ schedules. They’re sorted below into categories similar to the Summer Olympic events.
(This is far from a comprehensive list, and there are entire cultural or industrial multisport competitions that are incredibly compelling, including Highland Games in Scotland, Timbersports — here the athletes compete in using axes and saws similar to lumberjacks — and Alaskan Natives’ Traditional Games, just to name a few.)
Team sports
Upcoming Olympics will reintroduce lacrosse, which is played professionally and collegiately across the U.S., and will for the first time feature flag football. If India is selected to host the 2036 Olympics, a couple of tag-like games could be included too, and cricket might return.
Another popular sport combines two current Olympic favorites: soccer and beach volleyball. Beach soccer is played 5-on-5 with standard-size goals and unlimited substitutions.
If that’s still too tame for soccer fans, there’s also Omegaball, which moves the game to a circular field — then adds a third team and a third goal.
Running
The most basic of Olympic sports has inspired a cornucopia of variants, including mud runs that insert messy obstacles into the course, rucksack races that add weighted packs, or even races that let running buffs run in the, uh, buff.
Or you can bust out more useful skills by participating in an adventure race, which like a triathlon may require multiple modes of travel, and may not include a marked course, requiring participants to navigate to the finish line on their own.
Climbing
You can get your fix through winter with an added degree of difficulty in ice climbing. Or if you just enjoy watching competitors eat it, ESPN sometimes televises the Wipeout-adjacent Slippery Stairs.
In the water
Red Bull has a 15-year-old series of cliff-diving competitions in which athletes may leap from nearly 100 feet up, which really makes wings-delivering products sound tempting. Or for a much tamer (and cuter) water sport, you might consider dog surfing.
Another swimming discipline (one that might be, dare we say it, more useful than the butterfly or breaststroke?) is lifesaving, in which competitors take on a variety of lifeguard-type tasks, including swimming under obstacles or dragging a mannequin the length of the pool. A surfing variant may be considered for the 2032 Olympics in Australia.
Net sports
Tennis’ next Grand Slam tournament, the U.S. Open, starts later this month, and a national table tennis league was founded last year. You could also get into tennis-adjacent squash, which makes its Olympic debut in Los Angeles in four years.
As for non-Olympic sports: There’s already a professional pickleball league? Of course there is, friend — what timeline did you think we were in? Other variants include Forehand Strike, in which racquets are replaced with padded gloves, and table volleyball, a sort of mushing-together of volleyball, soccer, and table tennis played across a speed-hump-shaped table.
Riding sports
Another round of the X Games, this one focused on skateboarding, BMX biking, and motocross, roars through Chiba, Japan, in September. But if you crave something closer to Paris’ mountain biking competition, you could check out the racing league launched by hoverboard manufacturer Onewheel. You may have seen folks tooling around on these skateboard-like self-balancing scooters in your neighborhood, but you probably haven’t seen them tearing down trails at speeds that can top 25 mph.
If that’s too tame for you, there’s always street luge — the asphalt-riding variant of the death-defying Winter Olympics sport, in which racers have topped 100 mph. There do not appear to be enough highly competitive crazy people to make a face-first version, street skeleton, a thing.
Combat sports
The varieties of martial arts and wrestling techniques created by cultures across the world are practically endless, and there are sure to be gyms near you teaching several of them. The venues can range from the salt-strewn, ceremony-wrapped sumo ring to the brutal octagonal cage of the Ultimate Fighting Championship. And then there’s carjitsu, where competitors live out the action-movie staple of brawling in the front seats of a sedan, using anything at hand to convince their opponent to tap out.
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