Greyhounds are a good start, now let's get rid of...

Finally it has happened. Greyhound racing in New South Wales is no more. Or at least it is not very much more, and is scheduled to be no more fairly soon.

In a year’s time there will be no more dishlicker dashes between the Murray and the Tweed, and frankly, I say good riddance. I devoutly hope other states will follow suit.

Of course, there are major humanitarian concerns behind the decision, and these are indeed compelling.

Widespread live baiting, the slaughter of tens of thousands of healthy dogs for being too slow – it is a dirty, gruesome business that we’ll all feel better for being rid of.

But there’s an added bonus for the sports lover in the greyhound racing ban, which is that greyhound racing is an annoyingly stupid sport and the sporting landscape will be less annoyingly stupid for being shot of it.

Dog racing is a stupid sport for the same reason that horse racing is a stupid sport. In fact, one is tempted to assert that they are not actually sports at all, but in deference to those ordinary, decent Australians who are missing the part of the brain that allows a fully developed human being to loathe animal races, I will graciously concede that they are sports: they’re just terrible ones.

And they are terrible ones because all good sports, and even all halfway, almost-okay sports, have one crucial thing in common: their participants are aware that they are participating in a sport.

When you look at the vast majority of sports – football, rugby, cricket, swimming, lacrosse, ten pin bowling, etc. – you find that at all levels of competition, the people engaging in these activities are at least dimly aware that they are. Watch next week’s State of Origin and you’ll notice that even Paul Gallen appears to have a vague sense that there’s an athletic contest afoot.

This, frankly, is not the case for greyhounds or race horses, and you can babble all you like about how much Black Caviar loved to run or how a horse you once knew really, really seemed to know what was going on. They’ve not got the slightest clue why we insane humans keep draping them in brightly coloured hankies and making them run in circles. If greyhounds knew they were in a race, they wouldn’t need a robot bunny. If horses knew they were in a race, they wouldn’t need jockeys.

So I’m quite keen, now that the ban ball has got rolling, to see horse racing knocked off the permitted list as well. Or at least modified so that the horses are the rocking kind.

Of course, even beside the problematic nature of sportspeople who don’t know they’re sportspeople being made to be sportspeople, there’s also the fact that proper sports are able to exist even when people don’t bet on them.

It’s not just horse racing that needs abolishing – a rational society would ban polo as well, simply to strike a blow against class divisions and reduce the number of ways in which the rich get to show off. Although a compromise, whereby polo continues but the players have to ride on greyhounds, would be acceptable also.

Now we’re really on a roll, let’s get rid of all the sports that give sport a bad name. Motor racing needs to go, for a start. I’m not denying that there is considerable physical prowess required to control a car or motorbike at high speed, I’m just saying that whatever part that prowess plays in the results of grands prix is dwarfed by the effect of the technological quality of the cars.

There’s discussion in the cricket world of limiting the size of bats: if cricket were like motor racing David Warner would already be walking out to the middle with both arms surgically converted to Howitzers. In most sports it’s injuries to players that put them out of the game: in motor racing it’s damage to the cars; as if Johnathan Thurston had to head to the showers five minutes into a grand final because his shoelaces broke.

We’re building up a nice head of steam now, so let’s ban boxing. It’s not that I don’t admire boxers, but the reason I admire them is the reason I want it to stop: a sport in which severe head trauma is an occupational hazard can be an admirable test of physical courage; a sport in which it is the main objective is utterly deranged. And let’s get rid of the UFC too, which is like boxing, only further back along the evolutionary timeline.

A sport which needs banning perhaps more than any other is ‘International Rules’, that ‘sport’ which is only ever played on this planet a couple of times a year, between just two teams, made up exclusively of players selected for their prowess in sports which aren’t the sport that they’re playing. It’s as if England’s best football players and France’s best rugby players met up every Christmas to play gridiron. For god’s sake stop it.

Synchronised swimming, of course, gets a lot of flak, and with good reason: it’s terrible. Stop it.

Maybe my most controversial recommendation is the abolition by athletics bodies of the triple jump. It used to be called the ‘hop, skip and jump’, and if they hadn’t changed the name, I’m sure it would have been banned already – or at least have died out naturally due to there being nobody willing to embarrass themselves by admitting to doing it.

A test of an athlete’s ability to jump in a pointlessly convoluted and ungainly fashion, the triple jump will this year yet again stand out as the most inexplicable Olympic event of them all. Ban it and get all the competitors doing long jump like normal people.

Sticking to the Olympics for a moment, time to unburden humanity of the neck-albatross that is rhythmic gymnastics. The athletic equivalent of the Holy Roman Empire, rhythmic gymnastics is neither rhythmic nor gymnastics, and as a sport seems to have been invented by a bored toddler trying to occupy itself while its mother talks on the phone.

As a species, we should have more dignity than to wave ribbons and balls around in the air and call it sport, and I call on my fellow humans to show that dignity now.

Well, that’s about it for now. Let me know in the comments if there’s a sport that needs banning that I have missed, and for now, at least, let’s raise a glass to Premier Mike Baird’s courage.

Oh, and darts. Piss off, darts.