In less serious news, the IOC voted today to drop baseball and softball as sports for the 2012 Games in London. They then managed to not add any sports to replace them; from a list of five possible sports they selected two for a vote (squash and karate), neither of which gained the two-thirds support needed to add a sport. Rugby, golf and "roller sports" (not sure what all was included there) were passed over without a vote.

All the balloting was done in secret (though the AP apparently came up with vote totals for the squash and karate votes), which was pretty controversial. The given rationale was to prevent embarrasment for the international sport federations if their given sport failed to gain many votes. Other people suggested it allowed for a lack of accountability. It seems kind of fishy to me, but there isn't much involving the IOC that doesn't.

The loss of baseball isn't all that surprising. The lack of MLB talent and the spectre of another drug-tainted sport sealed the deal. The softball result was more surprising, though from what US national team players have said it was a combination of anti-Americanism and the personal view of IOC head Jacques Rogge.

As for the proposed new sports, I'm pretty meh about squash, but thought karate had a chance given that martial arts are some of the newer sports (judo was added in 1964, taekwondo in 1988). I was very non-plussed about golf (for the same reason as tennis - it's not that big a deal compared to the major tournaments) and "roller sports", but thought rugby would be a nice addition. Sports Illustrated had an article in the last month or so which pointed out how rugby (seven a side for this purpose) would be easy to run and not add many athletes.

(Personally, I'd like to bring back pankration, but that looks unlikely.)

Which is kind of the root problem here - the Summer Games have gotten too big, and the IOC would like to find a way to hack them down a bit. One thing that would really help (and may be in the offing, I think) is more of an event-by-event approval process rather than by sport. For example, if you wanted to get rid of, I don't know, synchronized swimming, under current rules you'd have to vote out all of swimming. Which, of course, isn't going to happen.

Interestingly, you can apparently add events to existing sports without such drama (which explains how synchro got into the woodpile in the first place). There's already talk about that for 2012, most notably expanding the women's soccer tournament by two teams. Which, as a trade-off for softball, seems like a net loss.

I still think it'd be better if some of the weather-neutral sports were moved to the winter. I know, the Winter Games traditionally only have events that involve ice or snow. But not only would moving some of these sports help with logistics, you could also get more face time for sports lost in the summer shuffle. Not sure which ones I'd move, but my short list includes weightlifting, table tennis, and volleyball (there's a dearth of team sports in the winter).

At least the IOC gave the 2012 games to London. They did one thing I liked this week, which is kind of a miracle.