[This is part 5 of our ten day most memorable Olympic moments countdown to the 2012 Olympics. The daily non-Olympian athletic gratuitous eye candy is just a bonus.]

Olympic sports tend to come and go. Those with staying power you’re familiar with. At least if they involve lots of male flesh. The events that have fallen by the wayside are a different story. Women’s softball was dropped from the list of events for the 2012 Games, but then there are plenty of other sports for the lesbians to participate in so no one will really notice. Today, the IOC determines which sports will make it to each Olympic Games and which will be dropped. But in the early days of the modern Games, the host country made that call. That also mean the host country always won the most medals. And may explain why the Paris Games in 1900 holds the record for most onetime events in the history of the Olympics. Damn French.

Cricket debuted and died at those Games, as did croquet. Underwater Swimming too saw its singular Olympic appearance in Paris. But the French piece de resistance was the event that became the first and only competition in the history of the Olympics to award a gold medal for killing live animals. Live Pigeon Shooting – the event’s official name – did not turn out to be a crowd pleaser.

“The idea to use live birds for the pigeon shooting turned out to be a rather unpleasant choice,” sports historian Andrew Strunk wrote in a 1988 article on those Games. “Maimed birds were writhing on the ground, blood and feathers were swirling in the air and women with parasols were weeping in the chairs set up nearby.”

The birds were released in front of each competitor, much in the way clay targets are fired out of traps these days, with the object of the event being to kill as many birds as possible without missing. The pigeons were released one at a time, and a contestant was voted off the island once he failed to down two pigeons in a row. In all, nearly 300 birds were shot from the sky tthat day. An award of 20,000 Francs was the prize for the winner, though the top four finishers agreed to split the winnings.

By the 1904 Games in St. Louis, the live birds had been replaced by clay pigeons, and the sport – which includes the events of Trap, Double Trap, and Skeet – slowly evolved into its present day spectacle of athletes armed with shot guns blowing clay discs out of the sky.

At the 2012 Games in London, the clay pigeons are going the way of their earlier flesh, blood, and bone brethren. They are being replaced with ‘electric pigeons’ which critics are calling pigeon drones. Traditionalists are calling foul claiming the move away from clay pigeons is an affront to the history of the sport and the prestige of the Olympic event. No really.

[‘The XXX Games’ are a series of posts about hot Olympians, gay competitors – both present and past – and general articles about the 2012 London Olympics of interest to gay men. So, yeah, lots of hot male eye candy. Click the XXX Games graphic below for additional news, stories, and pictures.]