Buuuuut…we still hold the Olympic title for cricket. When we win the Ashes, we’ll consider allowing the sport back into the Games 
I’m very disappointed that Rugby Sevens didn’t get in. Not least because it’s absolutely suited to the short timeframe in which the games take place.
See, I can understand Cricket as an Olympic sport, much more easily than I can understand Baseball.
Cricket, after all is one of the major national sports of India…a country with a population of over a billion!
Add in Pakistan, Bangladesh, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Australia, the UK, Jamaica, the West Indies and whoever else can muster a national team and you’ll realise that worldwide it’s much bigger and more popular than baseball, and definitely has the “more than three continents” rule well covered. It might not have the 75 countries…but India is so big it might count for a few.
I get that it’s slow, boring, takes all day and that the rules are almost impenetrable to an outsider, but it’s still a major world sport.
Australia’s trampoline entrant for Athens was in her late thirties. I was talking about the artistic gymnastics team when I was discussing squads, but a child born in 2005 would only be about 11 by 2016. Are you getting your maths mixed up?
Gymnasts are getting older. Two members of the USA gymnastics team for Athens are in their mid-twenties. For one Australian gymnast, Athens was her third Olympics.
I can see why cricket would be a valid addition, but I don’t see how this places it ahead of baseball, which is obviously played on more than three continents, is the biggest spectator sport in Japan and the second biggest in the United States, and it quite popular (and growing) in China. I mean, we can play name-the-country all day if you like. Cuba, Venezuela, Canada, Taiwan, Australia…
I’m pretty sure that if NASCAR hasn’t already passed MLB, it will within the next couple years.
the Olympics so we know that we’re halfway to the next World Cup.
We’ve had this discussion before. There was in fact an entire thread on the subject.
It is impossible for NASCAR to have as many spectators as MLB. There is simply no conceivable way a sport with 40 to 45 events can possibly draw as many fans as a sport with over 2500.
Despite basketball being in the summer Olympics, it’s a winter sport. Dr. Naismith specifically invented it to have something to play indoors out of the snow.
As for the salaries mentioned, you have to remember too that NBA teams carry 12 player and MLB teams carry (I think) 25.
Sure. So is football.
It depends on what you mean by “record-breaking athletic prowess.” It may not require as much pure strength as some other sports, but it requires enough strength to stay with a horse (not just on the horse) at all speeds and, for some events, over huge jumps. Sure, no one is going to outmuscle a horse. But you’ve got to have enough strenth that you don’t interfere with your horse and can help him out when he gets to a bad spot in front of a giant oxer or enough to stay with one of those big moving warmbloods through an extended sitting trot. It also requires flexibility and a lot of coordination. Also, just because your sister doesn’t have record-breaking athletic prowess, doesn’t mean the top riders in the sport don’t have to be really fit. I don’t mean to imply that your sister isn’t competitive or a good rider. It’s just that a lot of us compete in various sports and are good at them, but we’re far from athletic enough to hold our own against the tops in the world. It’s the same with riding. Many people can ride, but it’s harder to ride well–and a lot harder to ride well enough to compete with the best of the best. I would agree that it’s more a matter of coordination and body control than strength, but I consider those to be athletic.
When was pentathalon dropped? I know it was in the Athens Olympics. I thought it was one of those sports that was in as a legacy. By the way, the horses for the penthalon are loaned for that competition alone. The competitors don’t have a regular mount like in equestrian events. But, yeah, just getting a mount to ride and train with can be costly–even if you don’t need one of your own. (I should add that I’d be in favor of dropping pentathalon from the Olympics if only because I saw the riding portion of one and was horrified at a couple really ghastly rides.)
What an oddly narrow definition of “biggest”. You measure popularity only in attendance figures?
NASCAR draws (or will soon draw) higher television ratings than MLB, and ratings are measured in the millions, so attendance figures are all but trivial in comparison. (Unlike, say, the NHL, where attendance may actually be higher than viewership. So sad.)
You wouldn’t have a link to that thread, would you? Obviously there is nuance that I’m missing, and rather than rehash it here, I could just read (and possibly bump) the thread devoted to it.
My comment was based on a SI bar graph comparing the ratings of the NFL, NASCAR, MLB, and the NBA. The numbers were (roughly, from memory):
NBA: 2.?
MLB: 5.?
NASCAR: 5.?
NFL: 12.?
One unrelated interesting note (not from the article) is the comparison of attendance for the NHL/NBA and the NFL. If you vastly simplify things, you could say that the NBA/NHL attendance is 40 home games of 16,000 people, while the NFL is 8 home games of 80,000 people, which gives the same (potential) attendance figure for all three: 640,000.
Modern pentathlon was not dropped from the Olympics. It almost was, but it agreed to change its format slightly. I believe all the events are contested on the same day now. It used to be held over a series of days.
Baseball was a demonstration sport for the 1984 games. (And in early ones also.) But the IOC has eliminated demonstration sports. You’re either in or out.
I would agree with earlier posters that the reason that baseball was dropped from the Olympics was that its best players don’t compete. The Olympics doesn’t like that. Golf didn’t make the cut, because the IOC wanted a guarantee that if you had Olympic golf, you will have Tiger Woods playing. But the golf people can’t guarantee that?
Who runs international golf anyway? The rules for golf are set by the USGA and the Royal and Ancient?
Ahh, here it is, the International Golf Federation
http://www.internationalgolffederation.org/
It used to be called the World Amateur Golf Council.
Go figure.
Softball was dropped because it was tied in with baseball. And it wasn’t particularly competitive.
I don’t get the point.
My point was that basketball gets the much of the world’s best because they are not playing pro ball when the Olympics are running. Baseball players are, as are hockey, although the NHL did break for the Olympics.
Baseball had a few advantages when it was a demonstration sport in 1984 and 1988 because the host nations: USA and Korea, both played the game.
It became a medal sport in 1992 for Barcelona. So the home nation, Spain, got to enter a team. And in 7 games, the Spanish were outscored 85-15, but they did manage to win one game (against Puerto Rico.)
In Atlanta, no team was really awful. In Sydney in 2000, the host Australians played several close games, but lost most of them. South Africa got invited, but they were terrible. In 2004, the US didn’t make it and the host Greeks actually managed to put together a respectable squad.
You may want to consider that there are far more baseball games on TV than NASCAR races.
I’m not a big NASCAR fan, nor am I a big MLB fan, so I don’t really have a dog in this fight.
It was amazingly difficult to track down any concrete numbers, but I finally stumbled across an article that had most all the info I wanted in a nice straightforward article.
Interesting, and seems to agree with you guys. I’ll concede right now, but would still appreciate a link to the referenced thread.
Also, I’d love to find a cite for the total attendance and total tv viewership for the entire 2004 season for each of MLB, NASCAR, the NHL, the NBA, and th NFL, ideally broken up between the regular season and playoffs. Anybody know of one?
MLB total regular season attendance in 2004 was 73,022,972, according to baseballreference.com, an average of about 2,430,000 fans per team.
Playoff games drew an additional 1,625,125 fans.
Good info on the playoffs. ESPN’s site has attendance broken down by team, and when I exported the 2004 season list to Excel and summed the numbers, it came to 72,968,???. Or, about 30 thousand shy of 73 million.
While it has similar pages for the other sports, there was no attendance info on NASCAR. Also, I have yet to find any aggregate ratings info for any sport. (Not that I’m looking very hard.)
I actually hand-added baseballreference.com’s number in a calculator. I’d trust them more than I would ESPN, but attendance counting in any event is not an exact science.
You’d think it would be, but it isn’t. Look at the attendance numbers for, say, the Red Sox playoff games. The figure varies from game to game. How is that possible? The stadium sold out every game and they didn’t change the number of seats every day. Shouldn’t it be the same number? Beats the hell outta me.
Actually, baseball is very popular here in the Netherlands (it’s called honkbal here). The Dutch national team just won the European championships by beating up on all the other teams, and they have beaten Cuba and the U.S. in previous World Championships. I think there are also a few players in the major leagues who qualify for the Dutch national team (since they are from the Dutch Antilles). These would be Sidney Ponson (Aruba) and Andruw Jones (Curaçao).
Also, Bert Blyleven was born in Zeist. There are other Dutch perennial All-Stars 
like:
Hensley Meulens (Curaçao)
Calvin Maduro (Aruba)
Ivanon Coffie (Curaçao) … (what a great name by the way)
Robert Eenhoorn (Rotterdam)
Rikkert Faneyte (Amsterdam)
Gene Kingsale (Aruba)
Ralph Milliard (Curaçao)
Win Remmerswaal (The Hague) … (another great baseball name!)
Randall Simon (Curaçao)