Olympic sports dropped and added

At the 2016 summer Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro there will be 28 official Olympic sports, two more than at the next games in London in 2012. The two sports that will be added will be golf and rugby. There were actually 28 sports at the Beijing games  but two sports were dropped from the games, baseball and softball.

OK, golf is widely played around the world though it is a sport that is not exactly reserved for the masses  on account of needing manicured golf courses and we all know how much money goes into that, not to mention the big bucks it costs to belong to a country club, take lessons and buy the proper equipment.

Rugby, OK, let’s have it at the Rio games, it is played by quite a number of nations though at the games they will have the rugby sevens, an offshoot of rugby played by teams of only seven players rather than the classic rugby made of 15 players on each team. I hope Papua and New Guinea will make it as they do have a regular rugby team, and the sevens is played by unlikely teams as Uganda, Brazil, Japan and Thailand.

I like the participation of obscure nations in the Olympic Games as that’s the way it should be. For example it’s good people notice Bhutan is competing in archery, their national sport, and they are good at it, or that Jamaica actually has a bob sled team, I think that’s great.

The American women cried that softball was dropped from the Olympic Games. The American team pitcher Lisa Fernandez actually complained the decision will ruin the lives of millions, actually billions of women, she said! Well, the American team was beating up on all the other teams so bad that the IOC had to look at that scenario, as was the lack of participation among nations to begin with, hence not sure where these billions of women she had in mind are to come from.

Archery was rightfully added as Olympic sport because indeed the sport is a one kind of sport that has been part of man’s skills globally, regardless of his culture, remote cultures included, for almost as long as man has been a hunter.

Related to the premise that global reach of the sport is important in order to add it to the Olympic program, the tug of war event, which was part of the Olympic Games in the early 20th century, then dropped, should be reinstated. In fact this is one sport which all nations should be required to participate in at the games as all nations can pull on a rope regardless of how poor they may be.

On the other hand, while tennis has been added it is doubtful the Olympic Games gold medal will ever surpass the meaning of a Wimbledon or US Open trophy, hence why bother when even the diehards of tennis care a less if Federer will win the Olympic gold medal.