http://en.beijing2008.cn/sports/ I watch a lot of Olympic coverage and have seen Kayaking, trampoline and a handball that are new to me. On this list you can see the general categories. then click and it shows the subsets and a description.
Should these be included in the future? Racketball ,bowling. golf and softball have been removed for the future. Was that a correct decision? Sometimes a sport is demonstrated to see if it gets traction.
They’re certainly all legitimate sports, if that’s what you’re asking. The Olympics look for a sport to be played seriously in a substantial number of countries, to attract TV viewers, not to be too expensive to host, and to have the competing nations send their best athletes.
Racketball, bowling, and softball are all borderline cases at best by those standards, but sure, why not golf? It’s been in the Games in the past, after all. Probably the only reason it isn’t is the difficulty of getting pros to give up several weeks of big paychecks to go defend their countries’ flags. But tennis worked that out.
The IOC has limited the number of sports that they will allow in the summer Olympics to 28, IIRC. More sports will need to be dropped before others are added, probably.
There are strict requirements to qualify a sport for the Olympics, too. You can probably find them on wikipedia, but the sport has to be practiced in a certain number of countries, across (IIRC, again) at least three continents. So everything in has passed that test of “legitimacy”.
I’m always a little nonplussed by things like racewalking, but, eh. It’s apparently popular enough to keep.
Here is my thread on why I don’t think golf should be included
I support softball being included 100%. While baseball has the World Baseball Classic and of course the World Series, there is nothing equivalent for softball.
Which is a good argument for why the IOC should finally drop the soccer tournaments from the Olympics. A good idea at the time they started, long since eclipsed by the World Cups.
No, most of these aren’t legitimate. Trampoline, Rhythmic Gymnastics, Beach Volleyball, and Syncronized Swimming should be taken out immediately.
What about archery and shooting.?
I’d say no as well. Archery and shooting have the classic competition thing going for them, but I don’t see them as sports. They are competitions of physical skill based marginally on athletic ability.
If they’re going to have sports like Archery and Shooting, I see no reason for Billiards and Pool to be left out.
There are tons of sports in the Olympics, both winter and summer, that don’t require extreme physical ability. Dressage, for instance. Sailing. In the winter Olympics you have curling - a sport which is played in Canada mainly with a beer in the other hand to counter-balance the rock…
I don’t have any problem with Olympic golf, Olympic billiards, Dressage, shooting, and other non-physical sports. I have a bigger problem with other legitimate sports being left out. For example, Karate meets all the requirements for the Olympics - there’s an international sanctioning body, etc. Yet Tae Kwan Do is in the Olympics, and Karate isn’t. I’d love to see Olympic Kata competition, for example. Both traditional and freestyle. The freestyle would wind up looking almost like a gymnastics floor routine.
There are some other big summer sports like water skiing that could also be in the Olympics. If snowboard half-pipe can be in the winte Olympics, water skiing with jumps could be in the summer.
The biggest problem with the Olympics is that there are too many events - you can’t see them all on TV, and the number of facilities required is causing the cost of hosting the Olympics to skyrocket. But this will be fixed over time by the internet.
Another thing they could consider would be to have a ‘main’ Olympics, and then scatter other Olympic events throughout the Olympic year. Kind of like how the Oscars splits out the technical awards into a different venue. So the official Olympic golf could be a month earlier, Olympic martial arts could be held all together during another event that year, etc. Then each country’s Olympic stats would be updated as the summer went on.
I don’t have an argument against karate being in the Olympics other than you have to stop somewhere, and I like that there is a range of activities included in the Games. I mean, you could fill it up with martial arts sports, but then it wouldn’t be the Olympics, it’d be the World Hand to Hand Combat Competition.
What exactly is “trampoline”? Who can bounce the highest?
It’s sort of like the opposite of diving.
Trampoline is not much different from other gymnastic sports - you do various aerial moves that require tumbling and twisting.
It makes more sense to have trampoline than rhythmic gymnastics or ice dancing.
I think we could cut synchronized swimming and rhythmic gymnastics for a couple more martial arts events, and that would make the majority of people happy (or indifferent). Synchronized swimming is so much more niche than say, karate, and seems more like performance art than an actual Olympic sport.
A mixed martial art event would be awesome, as well, and is a much more basic Olympic-style event than most. 100m dash is about who can run the fastest, 200m freestyle is about who can swim the fastest, and MMA would be who can fight the best (within safety standards, of course).
I’d also be willing to get rid of sports for which the Olympics is an unimportant sidebar, like tennis, soccer, baseball, and basketball. I like all of those sports, actually, but it seems quite pointless considering that the best players in those sports often don’t (or aren’t allowed to) show up. They all also have much more prestigious events than the Olympics, which are often regarded as just a possible place to get hurt and interfere with your real competitions (see tennis and soccer players, especially). For tennis it’s particularly strange, since EVERY ATP tournament, esp. Grand Slams, are Olympic-like international events.
I was watching handball the other day, and couldn’t help but feel that after 10 minutes practicing in the gym with a few of my friends that we’d be ready for the Olympics.
If they aren’t based on some sort of athletic ability, then how is it some people are so much better at them? Jedi powers?
Something either is a contest of physical skill or it is not; archery is purely a contest of physical skill.
To my mind the Olympics should seek to include ALL sports that have sufficiently large international followings. That isn’t how it works, though; the sports chosen are generally the ones with sufficient influence or bribe money.
Trampoline is who can say “weeeeeeeeeee!” the loudest. 
Team handball is unknown in the United States, but quite popular in Europe. I remember how excited I was to find a team handball match on my hotel TV in Greece–“Wow, they really play this outside of the olympics!”
Yes, you do have to stop somewhere. But the problem is that they’re dropping or not including all kinds of interesting and popular sports while stuff like “synchronized diving” is proliferating. I realize that a lot of events like synchronized diving can be included at little extra cost because they don’t require their own venues, but it’s pretty galling to see all that being added when softball is being dropped. And yes, there are way too many events overall. One way to mitigate this is by trimming a lot of these variations on a theme that are clogging the schedule.
I’m in favor of oddball sports staying in the Olympics if there is a historical precedent for them. And maybe popularity with viewers ought to be taken into consideration, too. In addition, the Olympics can introduce people to sports they might otherwise not know about, and that’s really neat. But when the balance tips too far away from stuff most people can relate to, then the Olympics starts seeming kind of silly.
I agree that it’s worth considering whether there are other prestigious worldwide competitions when thinking about dropping or adding a sport. As others have pointed out, Soccer has the world Cup, and tennis has Wimbledon and the other major competitions. The Olympics seem kind of irrelevant. It would be pretty ridiculous to add golf.
ETA–Freddy the Pig–Strangely enough, European Team Handball was one of the options you could take for gym at my high school. It was really popular.
I think you severely underestimate the physicality of handball.