Forget Beijing next month. The real games to watch were Tuesday’s Zookeeper Olympics at Point Defiance Zoo & Aquarium.

OK, cutthroat competition it was not. But that didn’t stop a few from playing the role of the prima donna athlete.

“This was rigged!” Lisa Triggs yelled before giving in to bouts of hearty laughter. “We totally won the animal chat competition.”

She doubled over with giggles for a few seconds before adding, “I think the fix is in.”

Her suspicions were on alert after her team, Point Defiance’s zookeepers, won only three of the seven events against the nonzookeeper employees. About 75 people participated in the games, held on a grassy area near the zoo’s entrance. Dozens of visitors stopped to watch the competition.

The first event set the tone that this wasn’t a typical discus-and-javelin competition. Five members on each team took turns trying to guess which droppings came from which animal in a photo identification competition called “Whose Scat is That?”

Justin Curti was the first participant on the nonzookeepers’ team and matched a few (the elephant was a gimme). That wasn’t bad, he said, considering most were total guesswork.

“I work in the gift shop,” he added. “How am I supposed to know this stuff?”

A nearby table with trays and all sorts of fruits and vegetables was the site of “Chop Chop,” in which competitors had a few minutes to arrange a proper meal for one of the zoo’s inhabitants.

The animal? A crow. And because they’ll eat anything, the winner’s tray included goodies such as discarded Kellogg’s Nutri-Grain Bar wrappers.

“That really sealed the victory,” said Shari Haimberger, a visitor from Topsfield, Mass., who was pressed into judging duties. “The shiny paper was a dead giveaway if anyone has dealt with crows before.”

Public speaking and improvisational skills were on display during “Whose Chat is All That?” Each team had five participants who had to pretend they were talking to a large group of visitors. The zookeepers learned seconds before the event started that they had to describe a dragon. A unicorn was the nonzookeepers’ assignment.

Sculpting took center stage in the “Meat Molding Mayhem” event. Each team took giant logs of raw ground beef and transformed it into something resembling an animal. One side claimed it created a sea horse; the other said it was a sea creature called a nudibranch.

Both looked like giant blobs of raw meat with pieces of fish sticking out.

“It got pretty ugly at times,” staff biologist Derek Woodie said. “But it’s not easy to make it look good.”

Participants in a relay race carried buckets of water and had to stop to answer questions about the zoo (“Where are the polar bears?” “What time do you close?”). Siphoning saltwater from a cooler – a task many aquarium employees perform – was the next competition.

The final event was something usually reserved for a school field day: a race involving balancing an egg on a spoon and weaving a wheelbarrow around cones.

After that, it was snack time for the zoo employees.

“This was so much fun,” Triggs said. “It allowed us to just be kind of crazy out here.”

Scott Fontaine: 253-320-4758

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