Excerpt from the book Sports the Olympics Forgot This book describes 40 sports that ought to be played but aren’t, because I made them up.

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The first winners of the Igloo Hay Bale Relay were the Sioux City Boys from Iowa representing the USA. Their captain, Bill Simmons, was ecstatic with the victory:

“Well we knew we could do this because we haul hawgs and bales all day long back home on the farm; we figured that to practice we should carry everything rather than using sets of wheels and that stood us in good stead for this here contest. I was only sorry that my gramma, Little Missy, couldn’t be here.”

The contest still runs to this day having comfortably outlived the Soviet era and survived the mechanization of farming. Some of the records for the event have lasted for many years – the women’s Record for throwing 100 bales into a barn was set in 1938 by Olga Stepanovs – 9 minutes and 34 seconds. The men’s hay bale throwing record was set in 1931 by Alexei Yeltsin 54 feet 7 inches and this distance survived the attempts of Eastern Bloc athletes in the 1970s and 80s to better it.