World’s Strangest

Growing up, I loved pretty much anything that was remote controlled. I would race cars, play this video game where you pretended to have a remote control airplane, even tried to turn my model boat into a r/c racing ship (alas, she sunk within seconds of launch). So excuse me for loving this video. Bonus points [...]

Alicia Follmar, a student at Stanford University, fell hard early in a race. Then several runners ran over her. Most people would then quit. But Alicia Follmar is not most people. She stood up and, though bloody, bruised and in great pain, started running again: As she powered her way from 10th to third over the [...]

Getty Images After more than 500 losses, Teddy Roosevelt has finally won his first Presidents Race. (Yes, the Rough Rider won the 1904 presidential election, but until today, he had never won the Washington Nationals’ mid-game Presidents Race.) On the final day of baseball’s regular season, Teddy came from behind to beat his fellow Rushmores – George [...]

And even if he’s not, let him win the race. Wookiees, artist Ming Doyle would remind us, tend to pull people’s legs out of their sockets when they loose. Artist’s Website -via Comics Alliance

Getty Images When Usain Bolt, Wallace Spearmon and the rest of the field line up for today’s 200-meter race, they’ll kick off the race not at the fire of a pistol, but a noise triggered by an electronic gun. Did previous Games use actual pistols? Yes, but they’ve been scrapped for both safety and fairness. The guns [...]

Olympic history books are filled with stories of amazing individual performances and team achievements. But from poorly conceived competitions to spectators attacking the judges, a lot of crazy stuff has happened along the way. 1. Killing Animals Causes Horror, Fainting Live Pigeon Shooting, 1900 Paris Olympics Live Pigeon Shooting was the only time in Olympic history when [...]

You cannot broadcast any part of the Olympic Games in the U.S. unless you are NBC. You can’t even say the word “Olympics,” so I expect to get a nasty email from the IOC any day. But The Wall Street Journal found a way to illustrate the race in which American swimmer Missy Franklin won [...]

Getty Images To bring the Olympic spirit to developing nations in the late 1990s, the Olympic Committee allowed a small number of “wild card” athletes to join the Games. But because they didn’t have to go through any qualifying rounds to compete, not all of the contenders arrived prepared. One such athlete was a swimmer from [...]

The races are strange, but the title refers to the boats. With a little ingenuity, you can build a boat, loosely defined as a “flotation device,” out of anything! 1. Beer Can Regatta The Beer Can Regatta is an annual event at Mindil Beach organized by the Lions Club of Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia. The participating boats [...]

Photo: Joe Barrett/Wall Street Journal What, you think that snowmobiles only go on snow? Joe Barrett of The Wall Street Journal explores the sport of watercross, where participants race snowmobiles on water: Most people think [...]