I read this proposal and was a little confused. Why aren't they proposing the actual sports pictograms that are in use for international events like the Olympics? Those are generally stylized human figures shown engaging in sports, but the suggested symbols in this proposal seem to mostly be pictures of sports equipment. It seems like reinventing the wheel. Are the Olympic-style pictograms not felt to be sufficiently emoji-like?
Singling out modern pentathlon, water polo, and team handball to be encoded as ZWJ sequences instead of atomic characters also seems arbitrary. Why would PERSON WITH BALL plus GOAL NET specifically imply team handball? It seems like that combination covers a lot of sports. Why should modern pentathlon require nine characters for a single symbol?
