The Multilympics

Just yesterday, almost simultaneously, the Athens 2004 Paralympics were indeed ended, and I, also, reached a conclusion.

You have all those Olympic athletes and you have all those Paralympic athletes. But you don't have any games where both kinds of athletes can compete together. The wheelchair athletes do their wheelchair athlete things. The running and jumping athletes do theirs. Couldn't they be doing their things together? Couldn't there be some kind of Olympically-proportioned sport where teams of differently-abled athletes compete with each other?

Well, I respond rhetorically, of course they should. And could. If they played in the Junkyard Sports Multilympics.

In a way, you could legitimately say that there's no such thing as the Junkyard Sports Multilympics, or any other kind of Multilympics at all. But you'd have to admit that there could be. So, ah, so easily.

Like, for example, a junkyardly kind of basketball where each team has two wheelchair athletes, or three, or one even. And only the wheel-chaired athlete can score. You could probably play football that way. Soccer even. That'd be fun. That'd be challenging for each according to her ability. Meaningfully challenging. For the whole team. For the entire family. Of man.