Now that the games of the XXXI Olympiad are almost over, it is time 
for the IOC to get ready for the 2020 games in Tokyo. Part of the Olympics planning is the inclusion of new events and in the past they have included golf, baseball, and ping pong. In the next four years I would like to see them consider more games to include a greater part of the global population.
Admit it, very few of us can swim that fast, jump that high, or squeeze into tiny spandex unitards. If they want us to watch more of the games, it’s time to include more games that we can relate to. Let’s take shuffleboard for instance. In the Winter Olympics, curling is a sport, and it is is nothing more than shuffleboard on ice, so why not include shuffleboard on land?
Swimming, diving, and water polo are the current sports in the Olympics so let’s include the most popular water sport of all time, Marco Polo. It would be exciting to see blindfolded swimmers splashing around, trying to catch competitors from other countries.
The Olympics currently include freestyle wrestling and Greco Roman wrestling, so why not add Arm Wrestling and Thumb Wrestling? They’re sports currently played in bars around the world.
Badminton and trampoline, popular backyard activities are in the Olympics so I say that we include the most universal backyard games, Hide & Seek and Tag. Both require a lot of running as well as evasive tactics and would bring in huge TV numbers.
And while Joey Chestnut continues to eat his way to victory in the annual Nathan’s hot dog eating competition, you can’’t tell me that there aren’t competitive eaters in other countries who could beat him. To make the competitive eating challenge more exciting, the host country would get to select the food to be consumed. In 2020 the games will be in Japan so I think a sushi eating contest would be appropriate and fun to watch. And you thought Zika made you sick, wait until you see competitors packing their cheeks full of raw fish.
Finally, it is time to embrace the Pokemon Go craze and involve millions of millennial slackers in the Olympics. Players would be turned loose in Tokyo to capture elusive imaginary monsters, and to make it even more interesting, we could throw a few real monsters into the mix. Hello Godzilla.
If you are a member of the IOC selection committee, I offer these suggestions to you for free in the hopes that the next Olympic games will be the best ever, and just maybe, I’d have a chance at a gold medal.
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