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Asian Games' look shaping up

Tuesday, 19th May 2009 ~ Maggie ~ Link ~ Comments (0)

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The new pictograms for the 16th Asian Games, taking place in Guangzhou in November 2010, were unveiled today, along with logos for the games' culture, environment and volunteer programs. The pictograms--those little images used to represent each sport look fine to us, though not quite as cool as the ones for the Beijing Olympics (that link also contains images of the pictograms for 17 other summer Olympics).

There will be 42 sports in the Asian Games, 49 events total (ie, cycling counts as one sport, but there will be competitions in track, road, mountain and BMX cycling). The non-Olympic sports include: baseball (dropped from the Olympics for 2012), cricket, dragon boat racing, golf, karate, rugby, softball (like baseball, dropped for 2012) and squash. In the "That's a sport?" category, the Asian games will include cue sports (billiards, carom, pool and snooker), board games (chess, weiqi and xianqi), bowling and dance sport (making its Asian Games debut in 2010).
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The games also will have a healthy helping of martial arts--karate, judo, boxing, taekwondo and wushu are all on the schedule.

Finally, for the Asian games sport that we've never heard of and most want to see live, sepak takraw beats out kabbadi. Kabbadi sounds like a mix of playground favorites tag and capture the flag. Sepak takraw "combines elements of soccer, volleyball, baseball, badminton, gymnastics and the ancient sport of sepak raga," according to the Asian Games' Web site--sounds like the MMA of ball sports.

Tags: Asian Games, baseball, Guangzhou Asian Games, kabbadi, martial arts, sepak takraw, softball