It’s important to keep a GLOBAL perspective here. I don’t remember the exact details at the moment but in order to get INTO the games a sport must have global participation, something like 6-8 years of world champs attended by something like 15 countries and organized by a governing body recognized by the IOC (such as the ITU), and petition 5 years prior to the Games the sport wants to be in. This is why Winter Triathlon got passed over for the next winter Olympics (we were third of 10 with only two sports being added). Winter tri didn’t exhibit a deep enough global following.
Right now the IOC wants to kill sports that are not truly “Global”, thus, softball is on the way out and basketball could be quick to follow. Yeah, the US thinks that crap is great but, except for very few other countries, these sports are nowhere on the Global radar.
Remember, the US likes to think we are the center of the universe but really our “major” sports (football, basketball, baseball) are nothing compared to the global popularity of Soccer (otherwise known as real football), Track, Cycling, F1, Moto GP, Golf, Tennis etc.
Look at Triathlon World Cup racing. In the rest of the world you have 50,000+ spectators showing up just to watch. Hell, there were something like 250,000 spectators at the 2007 Worlds in Hamburg. Yet, here we have the highest paying race in the world (Hy-Vee) and we can’t even get live TV coverage, much less coax fat ass middle Americans off their couch to watch. And I absolutely hate to say it, but, the main reason the Ironman gets such good TV ratings every year is due to the hellishly annoying human interest stories.
The best part of the Olympics too me is that for 2 weeks every 4 years it drags American TV and thus Americans out of their narrow minded little world and exposes them to a truly Global event. For 2 weeks the average, 80lbs overweight, cubical working, McDonald’s eating, Coke swilling (although I do like a good cold Coke), lazy, pathetic American will actually tune in and care about a sport like Triathlon.