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 final event of the regatta is the Blue Riband event – the two mile individual kayak Race using a table tennis bat. Jim Erikson has won this race 4 times, the last occasion was in 2009 when he recorded the quickest ever time of 2 hours 23 minutes and 12 seconds. After this race Erikson swore he would never race again as it was too difficult – “I changed from the Pen Hold Grip to the Chinese grip this year, at least at first, but I caught the bat on something and lost control of it, so I had to dive in and find it again. By this time I was well behind the other 72 competitors, so I reverted to the pen hold grip and made my way through the field, though by the end the webbing on my hand was split and my fingers were sore.”