[philh]

Well, not just technical excellence. I want to celebrate and encourage "the hacker spirit", which embodies playfulness as well. It takes a certain mind to look at Brainfuck and ask "do we really need all those instructions?" [1], even if it's not particularly hard, once you've asked the question, to see that you don't. (Mind you, I never looked for ways to minimise them myself, so it might be a harder problem than I'm giving credit for.)

I don't feel like the Olympics demonstrate the hacker spirit, although it's likely that some of the athletes have it.

[1] http://esolangs.org/wiki/BF_instruction_minimalization