Whatever happened to barrel jumping?

Question

in the winter olympics I remember it being my favorite event as a kid. Why did they drop it?

Answer 1

Barrel jumping was never an Olympic sport, although it is a sport indeed and has been covered on ABC's Wide World of Sports. And as the name implies, it's all about jumping over barrels–on ice skates. The skater circles the rink a few times, picking up speed. At about 30 mph, the athlete tries to leap over a batch of fiberglass barrels, side by side by side on the ice. The jumper must leap about five or six feet into the air to make it over, launching much like an airplane. (The world record is something like 18 barrels.) "We must have speed and guts," says Gilles Leclerc, president of the Canadian Barrel Jumping Federation, which tried for about 25 years to get the sport included in the Olympics. In 1992, the federation sent a jumper to a Lillehammer winter-sports festival, according to Outside magazine. But no dice. The demo was canned, perhaps because of fears the fellow would hurt himself. A video was shown instead. Olympic officials were not convinced. "It appeared to be a brutal sort of sport," a spokesman said. "Nobody really makes it. Everybody seems to fall on their backside." Leclerc, a former Canadian champion, says barrel jumping isn't dangerous, because the experts wear specially padded bodysuits and know how to land without hurting themselves. Even so, Leclerc says, the notion of barrel-jumping Olympians is dead. "We cannot do it," he says. "Now there are fewer countries, and the people are discouraged. When you are refused all the time, all the good jumpers stop training. Instead of going forward, we are going back.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4603198265945452960&q=barrel+jumping

Answer 2

Are you sure that was an official olympic sport and not just some crazy spector event?

Answer 3

what the heck is barrel jumping?