Welcome to a special Olympic edition of FTW Explains, where we break down the Olympic sports you are curious about, but don’t really understand. We won’t judge. Today we have modern pentathlon.
Modern pentathlon combines five sports that, quite frankly, make no sense together: fencing, horse show jumping, freestyle swimming and a combined run and shooting event. It was started in the 1912 Olympic either by modern Olympic founder Pierre de Coubertin or by Victor Black, the father of Swedish sports (there’s a bit of controversy over who truly founded it). The idea was to pull together military exercises — this was 1912, so they’re a little different than military exercises today — into one event.