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As the Olympic hype-machine comes to a media outlet near you, it’s time to reconsider bringing back one of the more egalitarian Olympic sports: tug of war.Take almost any Olympic sport in the modern Summer or Winter games, and you’re likely to find that, at best, a handful of countries are realistic medal competitors. In some sports, there are competitors and teams that are so much better than the rest of the field that the true competition is for second place.

Athletes from different countries often benefit from advantages simply unavailable to athletes from other countries. For instance, Australia’s Olympic curling team doesn’t have any dedicated curling ice anywhere inside Australia. The Canadian team, meanwhile, can find a sheet of curling ice in just about every town of reasonable size. The US women’s softball team benefits from a deep pool of players produced by college teams while our ping-pong squad is hampered by a such a shallow recruiting pool it’s practically a puddle. China, on the other hand, suffers from exactly the opposite situation.

Beyond differences produced by culture and climate, finances can have a big impact on teams. Some Olympic squads get heavy government backing while others are largely self financed. Squads with fancy modern training facilities are more likely to bring home medals than those that hold bake sales just to get to the Games.

Which brings us to the NFL. The NFL may not be a popular sport the world over, but it does have one important lesson to teach the International Olympic Committee: parity breeds popularity. Since moving to a financial model that promotes parity throughout the league, it has grown to become the most popular sport in America. The phrase “any given Sunday” is the common shorthand for the belief that any given NFL team can beat any other NFL team any time, any where. Like most phrases of that nature, it grew in popularity because it contained a kernel of truth. The NFL has enough parity between teams that there are no sure things, even between the best team in the league and the worst.

A sport that truly gave the little countries a chance to compete with the big countries; or the cold countries a chance to compete with the equatorial countries; or the poor countries to compete with the rich is exactly what the Olympics needs. That’s the niche I believe tug of war could fill. Every country in the world has heavy, strong, big people. You don’t need much more than a strong rope and a place to pull it, so fancy training facilities wouldn’t be much of a benefit. Technological doping wouldn’t be much of an issue. There no benefit to making the shoes lighter, or the uniforms more streamlined.

If you want to get everyone interested in the Olympics, give them a team to support in a sport they can reasonably hope to win. That’s the niche tug of war could fill.

Last Friday, I drove up to Oshkosh for the 2008 EAA AirVenture air show.As you may or may not remember, I was on my way up to Oshkosh for the 2007 AirVenture when the Avalon was rear-ended, so just getting there was an accomplishment this year.

Once I got there, it was the usual drill of dealing with the crowds, unrelenting sun, and the heat. I usually travel up there on a weekday, which keeps the crowds a bit more manageable, and this year I got lucky because much of the day was overcast which helped with the heat.

Unlike previous years, I tried to spend more time attending forums this year, and spent less time wandering among the aircraft. The forums give you a chance to hear interesting and notable speakers (Burt Rutan, for instance) in a small and relatively intimate gathering. By far the best forum I attended was given by a pair of veteran air traffic controllers who had worked several AirVentures. They were full of interesting insights and funny stories.

Even though I enjoyed the forums, the air show and the airplanes are a big reason to attend. The highlights of the air show this year were the V-22 Osprey and the F-22 Raptor.

The V-22 Osprey is the new tilt-rotor aircraft used by the Marines and Air Force. I had never seen one in person, much less in flight, so it was really fascinating to watch the plane come in with its gigantic propellors turning before rotating its engines and landing on the runway much like a helicopter would.

The V-22 Osprey was whisper quiet compared to the F-22 Raptor. That plane is an absolute screamer, even when it isn’t really trying. The F-22 flew over the pair of parallel runways for roughly ten minutes and the crowd loved every minute of it. Easily its most impressive maneuver was when it demonstrated its incredibly (almost unbelievably) tight turn radius. In the end, however, it was rather like watching an extremely high performance automobile being driven around a parking lot or a cheetah in a zoo. You just knew that it was capable of so much more than was on display and it was rather sad to watch it in such constrained circumstances.

There were some other interesting planes on hand this year. I enjoyed a tour of a Wisconsin Air National Guard KC-135. I didn’t realize that there were a large number of seats and cargo space on top of the fuel tanks in the plane’s cargo area. A KC-10 also made an appearance. A Navy SH-60 Sea Hawk was an interesting counterpoint to all the jets and planes on hand and its crew worked the crowd quite intensely.

Will I go back next year? Almost every year I say that I’m going take a year off and then the next year rolls around and I get the urge to go again. So, I’m thinking that next year I’ll take a year off. We’ll just have to see what happens when July rolls around again.

In the interim, there are some photos of the air show in the photo gallery.