We played team handball in an intramural league in college. It’s really not that easy to wing a ball that hard while leaping. You need a lot of upper body tone.
And playing goalie in the sport is one ofthe more masochistic jobs in sports. Even top quality goalies let in a dozen balls per match, and it’s kinda the same feeling you get when playing soccer or hockey goalie for each score.
As another idea, I’d really love to see an aerial sport enter the Olympics. Hang-gliding through an obstacle course (like the slalom) or something like that.
Perhaps it could be combined with one of the shooting events. 
If you can have snowboarding in the winter Olympics, why not skateboard half-pipe in the summers? Or Parkour? Now that would be cool - an Olympic Parkour course through Beijing, and crazy idiots racing each other through it. I’d watch that.
And I hate to say this, being a man and all, but women’s beach volleyball is really starting to bug me. I can’t believe the amount of airtime it’s getting. It’s like all you have to do is flip around the channels once, and you’ll hit beach volleyball somewhere. In the meantime, great Olympic sports like the various sailing races aren’t even shown unless an athlete from your country is in a gold medal race. Can’t cut away from the hot beach chicks.
They already have a biathlon…maybe they could call it the die-athlon? First, they shoot at scurrying targets from a tower and then via hang glider, they navigate the helicopters, SWAT teams, etc.?
Re: trampoline. I’m so out of the loop that I didn’t realize it was an Olympic event till I saw it televised the other day. The competitors create a routine and have to execute it in front of judges.
A couple of interesting things: 1) the peaks of the bounces are supposed to be at a consistent height, and 2) they have marked an inner rectangle on the trampoline surface, and competitors ideally stay within that square while performing. That suggests to me that it isn’t difficult enough. I.e. they need to add a couple degrees of difficulty to differentiate between otherwise very similar performances.
The cool thing, which almost redeems it: I kept thinking that if the (female) contestants just wore Catholic school girl outfits etc., it could be an advanced form of *The Man Show’s * “Girls on Trampolines.” What’s not to love about that?
Troy Patterson has a good take on beach volleyball in Slate.com today. I’ve long thought volleyball players, coaches, etc., went to great lengths to make volleyball look like a real sport and not something you can play in your back yard. When I was in the Army (30+ years ago) I played both volleyball and raquetball “competitively”, as we called it. I always felt like, of the two, raquetball was more of a sport.
The other day, my gf insisted on watching dressage. Dressage!? This is an Olympic sport?? It seems to be a contest of who can sit on a horse that walks funny. How is this a friggin’ sport, let alone in the Olympics??
My (Swedish) friend went to Australia as an exchange student and as he’d practiced handball as a kid, wanted to try it out while there.
Well, it turns out he got to practice with some of Australias finest (yes, some of them got to play in the Sidney-games) and he pretty much trashed them.
So, depending on where you’re from, you and your friends could probably play in the Olympics… and get completely trashed by the pros.
I’d love to see dragon boating make it into the Olympics some day. Internationally, it isn’t ready yet (it’s a very new sport, in it’s competitive incarnation) but it is a fantastic sport to watch, and compete in (I’m just in community-level teams, but race in two teams in a half-dozen competitions per season). In terms of facilities, the rowing basin is already set up, so other than perhaps adjusting the starting markers to accommodate the larger boats, the infrastructure is already there.
As things are right now, it is also a sport in which Canada would be likely to medal! (PDF of World Dragon Boat Competition results: http://www.idbf.org/documents/results/2008CCWC_Summary.pdf)
When curling is a recognized Olympic sport, you have to wonder.
Classic sports, like the javelin, have an obvious connection to warfare. And wasn’t that part of the original rationale, to have a competition where athletes could show their warrior skills without having an actual war and bloodshed?
Curling? Enemy, hold still while I slide this stone toward you! The sweepers are going to put an unholy smackdown on you in just a few moments!
The best sports, IMO, follow the Olympic motto: Faster, Higher, Stronger. At least they emphasize a kind of kinesthetic intelligence.
I am an equestrian…and I find Olympic dressage boooooooooorrrrrrrrrrrrrrring to watch. UGH. The irony is, it’s a bore to watch because everyone is so effin’ good. I watched a videotape of the 1996 Olympic dressage routines and was amused when I heard, “Oh no, oh that’s AWFUL, how heartbreaking!” as if the rider had fallen off or the horse sat down for a beer at A. Nope, they just missed one of the lead changes. It’s not like gymnastics, where you know a big error when you see one; the person falls on their ass, that’s bad. Horse blows a lead, who but the very few can tell?
I couldn’t finish the video. I, an equestrian who is familiar with dressage, fell asleep watching it and found it so boring I didn’t bother to restart it. I actually ended up selling it to a fellow Doper years ago, after I made a similar post about dressage’s yawn-factor for me. His wife was thrilled to get it, so cool. 
That said, dressage is a BITCH to ride and is extremely physically demanding. You have to have a rider so smooth, so ambidextrous (in even the simplest riding manuveurs, all four limbs are doing four different things), so aware of their body, so in control, that their cues are nearly invisible. And they HAVE to be, as they’re riding horses that are super-sensitive to every freakin’ thing the rider does. I’ve ridden lower level dressage horses and been stunned how just shifting your weight slightly, or taking a deep breath, or looking to the right (which causes slight adjustments in your body) is a cue–everything your body does in that saddle is a signal, so you better have excellent body control and awareness. That, and abs of steel. Sitting those HUGE extended trots is a monstrous endeavor.
My mare is pretty sensitive and that’s a good thing–it’s taught me to be a better rider because I have to have more body awareness and strength to get her to do whatever the task is at hand. But Grand Prix/Olympic level dressage?? EEK! No thanks!
Not that it’s on par physically with events like swimming, gymnastics, or running, but it most certainly takes a lot of physical talent and conditioning. It’s a shame that others cannot see it; as our society becomes less and less agrarian, people have little to no knowledge of horses and riding in particular, so it does just look like people riding funny-moving horses. Bummer.
And sadly, still boring.
IMHO, the following should be dropped:
equestrian events - they should have another olympics for any animal sports
archery - no athletic ability needed; not a sport
shooting - ditto
synchronized swimming - just silly
synchronized diving - ditto
trampoline - ditto
Replace with:
softball
cricket - don’t know if the 2 week time frame would work
sumo wrestling
kickboxing
mountain climbing
road cycling - mountain course
I forgot to add: no golf! As much as I love playing it, it’s not a sport. As ESPN’s Max Kellerman says, Tiger Woods might be a great athlete, but we’ll never know because all he does is play golf all the time.
Bomb Squad!!! I’d watch. From a distance, of course. 
I have to ask again; if there’s no athletic ability involved, then why are some people better at it than others? They aren’t games of chance or strategy.
Yesterday my my teen daughter was strongly contending that ping pong wasn’t a sport and shouldn’t be in the Olympics. I dunno - seems to require sufficient physical attributes - reflexes, hand-eye coordination - to qualify.
But this gets to the classic argument of what is or isn’t a sport, and how to distinguish between a sport and a game/activity. My daughter seemed to think a sport needed to involve a high level of physical activity. Without arguing the exertion expended by ping pong players, I asked what about shooters who move little other than their index finger. She said that wasn’t a sport either.
Seems to me that if you allow archery and shooting, you might want to allow darts as well.
But it is just one of the political issues inherent to the Olympics. Hell, tonight they are featuring BMX biking. Let’s have auto racing as well!
If I follow your reasoning, success in games that aren’t purely chance or strategy, in which some people are better than others, must be due to athletic ability.
I’d counter that this is circular reasoning. I simply don’t believe that having great target aiming ability is in any way related to athletic ability. To me, physical strength, speed and/or endurance are prerequisites to something being a sport. I acknowledge that there’s a fine line:
Basketball - definitely a sport
A basketball foul shooting contest - not a sport
Having done a tiny bit of archery in my younger days, I remember how hard it was to pull back the bowstring. Those things are taut! It certainly does take some athletic ability to keep the thing stretched while remaining on target.
Ed
Have you ever done archery? It takes quite a lot of upper body strength, especially as you get to farther distances. In any case, it’s always been there, so there should be a good reason to get rid of it.
I did in high school gym class, although I doubt that it was anything close to the olympic event. I suppose one could compare it to an NBA 3-point shooting contest, where it takes considerable muscular effort to consistently reach the basket with the appropriate arch, or golf, where a 300+ yard drive clearly helps your score. Again, there’s a fine line between a sport and game, and everyone’s criteria will vary. As an absurd extreme, one could argue that time-limit chess is a sport since some physical effort is required to move the piece and quickly smack the clock. Or tournament poker, where you need some physical ability to sit in a chair for 12 hours while maintaining focus on the game and the actions of your competitors.