Editorial: Lesson in minor sports

I have used the London Olympics as a learning tool. I'm always interested in learning new stuff so I used the Games to learn a little more about some of the lesser-known sports.

The sport of taekwondo attracted my attention and I was surprised to see how modern technology was involved. Competitors wear computerised sensors on their abdomen and feet so that strikes can be transmitted to the judges. Thus, to be a taekwondo judge, you have to be able to bear a fair bit of pain.

Strikes to the head, it seems, have to be noted visually. Or perhaps they check for facial footprints after the bout.

I had believed taekwondo was an ancient art with its origins lost in the Oriental mists of time but I was surprised to learn this discipline was only developed in the 1950s (think Vanguard Spacemaster and Hillman Minx) by the South Korean military.

In those days, of course, computers were in their infancy and a single computer was generally the size of a warehouse. This must have meant the contestants could not stroll out to the combat mat in a brisk, military, martial-arts fashion as they do today.

Rather, they would have lumbered out, towing their primitive computers and possibly having a lengthy lie-down before combat commenced. Just raising a leg would have been a big ask.

Beach volleyball attracted my attention too. Yes, I already knew it involved sand, a net and a ball but my focus tended to be on the ... er ... uniform worn by contestants in the female form of the sport.

My plan was to observe the uniforms carefully and draw some conclusions about how skimpiness affected performance. Unfortunately I forgot to record any data so I'll have to leave that exercise for the Rio event. I devoted only a little viewing time to what I shall call precision submarine swanning about without flippers. Suffice to say that it must have been a tough one to judge in the days before underwater cameras.

Judges would only have had the occasional glimpse of ankles breaking the surface of the water and, from that, I presume they had to imagine what was going on under the surface (possibly even a bit of hanky-panky).

What synchronised swimming did was combine ballet, gymnastics, swimming and general swanning about. Then, for reasons known only to its creators, it was all submerged. Naturally, other disciplines will follow its lead. In future Games, expect to see underwater hurdling, underwater javelin, underwater sevens rugby and underwater short-story writing. I also watched quite a bit of gymnastics. I'm sorry but I didn't catch the correct names of all the disciplines so please forgive me for using my own names. I'm sure they'll be enough for you to recognise them. I saw tumbling in leotards, romping a lot on the mat, swanning about on a swing and balletic ribbon waving.

Some routines were even performed on a device called a pommel horse. This is an attractive leather-lined cylinder, fitted with a couple of matching handles.

The gymnast grasps the handles and swings his body about in a quite alarming fashion, the reasons for which I do not wish to go into here. If you remove the matching handles you are pretty much left with a vaulting horse though why you would want one of those I shudder to think.

Hammer throwing really inspired me. At last, an Olympic sport I could try at home!

I marched straight into the garage, picked up a hammer , went outside and threw it into a paddock where it landed with an unremarkable dull thud.

I have to admit it failed to bring much joy and I wondered how such a sport came about. Must have arisen from man's basic need to chuck stuff. But why a hammer? I guess it was just random. Could have been anything really, a marinated prawn, a root vegetable, a cupcake.

So, as you can see, I have been devoting a lot of time to increasing my sports knowledge and I trust I have also increased your understanding of some of the lesser-known disciplines.

I hope you'll join me again from Rio in 2016. For those planning to visit in person, I'll be the one sitting on the beach collecting data.