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Synchronised Dimming

This morning I had a conversation with John Kerr around the time that a French Open tennis match was concluding. During our conversation John interrupted with the final result of the tennis match, and innocently asked me a leading question about the tennis players involved. I’m certain that the answer to this question was “yes”, but I didn’t really know and could only inform John that there a few sports I find more dull than tennis.

I really don’t care about tennis, the scores are mildly interesting, but the matches go on forever…twenty minutes is about the limit for me when it comes to watching tennis, after this I just can not possibly watch that ball getting hit backwards and forwards any more.

Oddly I can watch similarly repetitive sports, such as cricket, golf and lawn bowls for hours.

As the morning progressed, I started thinking about other sports which bore me to tears…the one that instantly sprung to mind was synchronised swimming which, to me, is probably the single most boring Olympic sport currently in existence.

However, when I mentioned it to myself, I accidentally said “synchronised dimming”, and this got me thinking, only a week or so ago the International Olympic Committee were considering adding skateboarding [1] (another sport I can’t stand) to the Olympics in an effort to appeal to a younger audience, and naturally this got the more light hearted talkback radio shows discussing other sports people would like to see in the Olympics. This morning, after thinking of “synchronised dimming” I started to work out what it would entail as an Olympic sport.

The premise is actually quite simple. Teams of an arbitrary number of people compete in a light dimming competition. Each team member controls one dimmer switch attached to one light, and together the team have to put on a light show in synchronisation with whatever music they choose. I haven’t the faintest idea how the scoring would work, but I would imagine that if the dimmer switches were on a wall, bonus points could be awarded to the team that does the best dancing whilst controlling the lights.

I wonder, if I was to submit that idea to the International Olympic Committee, would there be any chance of seeing it in the 2016 Olympics?

Samuel