These 9 New Olympic Events Got Kids Grounded In Michigan

While watching the Paris Olympics, I realized that nearly every event involved something I did as a child that got me in trouble when I was growing up in Michigan. Think about it.

Wrestling a little too rough with your sibling, and someone gets hurt? You're grounded. Fencing with sticks and poking someone in the eye? You're grounded. Pretend Jarts are javelins; embed one in your senior neighbor's thigh, and you lose your TV privileges for the rest of the summer. Think about just about any Olympic event, and you can imagine your mom yelling at you to stop if she saw you doing it.

Olympians Wear Protective Gear, Michigan Kids Need a Pile of Leaves

While I can't speak for everyone, growing up in a small community in Michigan during the '80s was an industrious time filled with carpentry. We built forts, dug holes, and constructed ramps. Not a single one of them was up to any sort of code, and none of them were completed using new materials. Were some "borrowed?" Maybe. Why? What did you see?

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What I'm saying is we sought to construct things that would ultimately lead to us risking our lives in some sort of fit of reckless abandon. If we built a treehouse, we jumped out of it. If we dug a deep hole, we either jumped in it, pushed someone in it, or built a ramp to jump over it on our bikes. We were unsupervised children who drank from hoses, and we loved it.

New Olympic Sports Our Parents Hated

If you had told me 30 years ago that breakdancing would be an Olympic event, I would have taken every single D-cell battery out of your boombox for uttering such stupidity. But here we are!