The Olympics are fun to watch, but they’re a little hard to relate to.
As enjoyable as they are, they can make the rest of us non-Gods feel pretty mortal. So what if they introduced a new, easier-to-do sport?
Behold: The Norwegian belly flopping contest.
The sport itself is pretty self explanatory and is probably a bit reminiscent of your days at the pool as a kid. Basically, the idea is to create the biggest splash while belly flopping onto the water from a diving board.
It’s kind of like Olympic diving but for regular people.
The sport is officially called Dødsing, or ‘Death Diving’ (its literal translation is ‘deathing’), and it basically just involves keeping your body as flat as possible from the moment you jump off the diving board, until just before you hit the water.
It doesn’t always have to be a belly flop, but it usually takes the form of one until the last moment when the athlete curls up to avoid injury.
According to Indy100, the criteria on which contestants are marked includes speed, height and power in the jump, style, width of the body’s spread, and the timing of the curl.
There’s even a world championship for it, which took place in Oslo on Saturday at the Frognerbadet open air baths where 30 athletes competed.
This is definitely a sport I can get on board with.
