The 2010 Winter Olympics are set to kick off in Vancouver this Friday, featuring 15 winter sports. While that sure is a bag of fun, are you aware of the weirdest Olympic sports of all time? Learn about it below. Oh, and be prepared - a bunch of them involve animals.

The 7 weirdest Olympic sports

1. Biathlon.

   Biathlon: Sounds like a contest to see how much biology you know. In general, it’s a sporting term for one event with two disciplines. In relation to the Olympics, it’s a winter sport combining-cross country skiing and… rifle shooting. Yeah… I’ll stay a safe distance away from that one.

2. Pigeon racing.

   Imagine a time when there was no Internet. No Super Bowl. Not even World Wars to look back on. That was the year 1900 - a year when pigeon racing was an Olympic sport.

   And, well, the only year that it was an Olympic sport.

3. Skeleton.

   Dare to believe in a whole new take on sledding. No, this is not the Rosebud from your childhood, folks. This is skeleton, a one-man face-down sled race on an ice track. I shudder to think why it’s called skeleton.

4. Skijoring.

   How much do you really trust your pet? Would you let Rover take the lead while attached to him with a rope… on skis? That’s skijoring, and it’s ski-aring the bejesus out of me. In the 1928 Winter Olympics it was a demonstration sport, using horses.

5. Curling.

   

   Curling, to me, sounds like it should mean something completely different - like some kind of salon Olympics. It’s anything but: the game involved two four-person teams sliding heavy stones towards a circle drawn at either end of an ice court. It originated in Scotland; somehow that makes sense.

6. Handball.

   You may be familiar with handball as a school recess favorite, but an older version of the game known as field handball did play a role as a sport in the 1936 Summer Olympics. It even had six teams contesting.

7. Korfball.

   Korfball is a version of netball played in outer space… Kidding! It is, however, a mixed-gender version of netball played in 57 countries. It was a demonstration sport in the 1920 and 1928 Olympic games. Each team consists of four men and four women… but no mixed duels! Keep it clean, kids.