Here Are The Best Baby Races Of 2016

Last week, Deadspin released its favorite sports moments of the year. The collection is beautifully written and well-curated on the whole, but it has one glaring flaw—there are no baby races.

Baby racing, the practice of placing unsuspecting infants on a basketball court and demanding that they crawl toward their cooing parents for the viewing pleasure of thousands of onlookers, is easily the best form of halftime entertainment. It is also a dumb, perfect sport in its own right. The baby race has no room for pretensions or inane rules; this is simple raw humanity on display. Babies do not care about the people watching or their incentives to win or the idea of playing the game the right way. They care only about themselves, and baby racing is better for it. And the world is better for baby racing, as the evidence below shows.

Rice men’s basketball halftime, February 23:

Sacramento Kings halftime, March 27:

Sacramento Kings halftime, November 24 (the Kings are perhaps basketball’s foremost purveyor of the baby race, and it was simply impossible to avoid giving them multiple spots on this list):

Chicago Bulls halftime, January 1:

San Antonio Spurs halftime, December 25:

Are these really the best baby races, you may be asking? Are all baby races not inherently good? No. They are not. To better appreciate the lovely examples above, take in the disgustingly overt parental cheating the Miami Heat permitted here. Or this atrocity from Fresno State, a university apparently so lacking in standards that it let a damn toddler compete in a baby race.

May 2017 bring more of these delights.