Pole Dancing for the 2012 London Olympics? Pole Fitness Tries to become a Legitimate Sport
Most people know pole dancing as the…‘sensual’ activity done in seedy gentlemen’s clubs, but it seems to have reinvented itself and is trying to become a proper sport. It seems what happened was that women, for a laugh, started to accompany men to strip clubs and saw women dancing on poles and thought it might be fun to try out. Some women set up poles in their homes and started to give it a try and found it to be a very vigorous and exhausting exercise. Soon competitions were set up, and then it became more and more popular until a world championship was introduced. Now with talk of the sport becoming part of the Olympics, it seems to have shaken its dodgy image away and may have become a proper sport.
It seems the history of pole dancing is more interesting than one might have thought. Even though the art of seductive dancing and striptease dancing has been around for a very long time, pole dancing got started in the early 1900s. In those days, burlesque shows would feature striptease performances to entice people to come back. In the travelling version of the shows, the entire performance would take place under a big tent and soon the large pole that is used to hold up the tent became a prop for the dancing women to use and they started to dance around it and on it. The earliest recorded pole dance took place during a show in Oregon in 1968, but today’s style of pole dancing seems to have originated in Canada during the 1980s. Women started to teach pole dancing to other women during the 1990s and the activity spread until it became more accepted after the year 2000.
The activity of pole dancing has become so established in the world today that there is even a world championship of pole dancing that takes place every year. Granted only the second ever event took place this year, but it is still a start. The second International Pole Dancing Fitness Championships took place two months ago in Tokyo and featured a multitude of athletes from 11 different countries. The eventual winner was declared to be Mai Sato from Japan who beat out the rest of the competition to claim first place. This amazing athlete trains for five hours a day, five times a week. She, along with many other pole dancers, says that it is a genuine sport because of the intense level of skill involved, the athletic ability needed by the dancer and the strength and conditioning required. It is for these reasons that a lot of people feel it is time for pole dancing to enter the Olympic Games.
The question now is whether pole dancing should become an Olympic sport or not. Pole dance instructors say that it should definitely become an Olympic sport because of the fact that it is a very athletic activity and a competitive event. It can be a sport just as gymnastics is at the moment. A lot of people in the pole dancing industry compare it to what skateboarding was a few years ago; it was a sport that was not taken seriously and no one thought it could become mainstream, but it has. A large number of people connected to pole dancing were lobbying to make the sport a test event at the 2012 Olympics in London and then making it a full event during the Rio Olympics in four years time. The only problem standing in the way of the pole dancers is conservative people who think that pole dancing has not done enough to distance itself from its seedy image and needs to do a lot more to clean up its act. Some others think that it will never lose its dodgy image and can never become a proper Olympic sport.
Whatever happens to pole dancing in the next few years and whether it becomes an Olympic sport or not, we will have to wait and see. However, in the meantime, the activity is doing all it can to distance itself from the strip clubs and the nasty image it currently holds. Being a very physical activity, it has full potential to become a legitimate sport in the future, if it has not already become one.
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