Olympic sports emoji

[Garth Wallace]

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?