Human Chariot Racing, Please and Thank You

J. Erstmill Chabbleshanks Esq. is a former sports editor at Bibbs and Tanner’s Herculaneum Periodical of Adroit Feats and can be found ranting about more than just sports at Zach Gets Down.

AGHAST! The summer doldrums are upon us once more. They come once every year, shortly after your month-long vacation to your island destination (this year I sold Cuba and purchased Ireland! How I love cooler holidays!), when there’s no more vacation to look forward to until your two-week-long Labor Day respite, and nothing but the dreaded and agonizing heat to keep you unnervingly aware that you cannot leave air conditioning unless you want to sweat right through your velvet undershirts. THE HORROR.

There’s nary a morsel of entertaining sports to behold either, in high society or in the plebian world. The tallest sport in the underworld, basketsball, is on an indefinite hiatus after the NBA Championship, as contract negotiations came to a halt and the collective bargaining agreement fell apart. Frankly, I don’t get what all of the hubbub is about: who cares who is squabbling between millionaires and billionaires? It’s like watching two vagabonds wrestle over an empty refrigerator box. SAVE IT FOR THE ALLEYWAYS, says I.

The BaseBall is still a month away before the interleague gambling that drives our own profits even begins to warm up, and football is in its pre-season, which is not unlike going to a thoroughbred horse race to watch some greyhounds chase a track rabbit. It is as unseemly as it is unentertaining.

Our own sports, as you well know, are in their dormant period, as all accounts are being rectified, debts being paid, and new athletes being super-fueled in high tech laboratories so that they are in their physical peak at the ripe age of two. Abbledrawsers just isn’t abbledrawsers without a good old fashioned decapitation!

This got me thinking about the potential of merging our two sports worlds. Using the plebian athletes for more august games, why, it’s never been done well before.

My first submission would be human chariots. The other day I was being driven next to one of those Asian conveyances, the rickshaw, when it pulled up next to another rickshaw. Naturally, I offered $10,000 to the first to make it 100 meters down the road. It was quite a competition, one that, fortunately for me, ended with each competitor being mowed down by crossing traffic, but it got me thinking!

Why not have a whole team of men and women hauling a chariot? With a large enough team, they could rival the speed of a NASCAR event, without all of the auto-mechanical monotony of continuously turning left. The chariot drivers would have to use specified strategies to encourage their team to keep mushing, either with brute physical force, or with a gammot of confusing retirement fund tampering or earnings potential! Plus, with a team, one doesn’t have to worry about the care of the chariot racers. If one falls, you can keep going!

Just a thought, of course. Perhaps when all of the sports of the world are in full swing again, this will seem less feasible. But I doubt it!

Excelsior!