Following up a news story from earlier in the year, the IOC's executive committee recently short-listed three sports that are in the running to replace wrestling in the 2020 Summer Games. The sports short listed were squash, baseball/softball, and... wrestling. Yes, wrestling may replace itself, which is a pretty good indication as to how the IOC works.

It's ridiculous that things got to this point to begin with, though I suppose the bright side is that the federation for wrestling used the dumping from the Olympics to clean house and refocus itself on promoting the sport. Still, it's a little too much blame the victim for my taste.

So we're down to these three sports, two of which should be in the Olympic program regardless (wrestling and baseball/softball) and a third, squash, which is pretty popular internationally and certainly worthy. In my book they'd all be in, and in the interest of whatever the IOC is trying to do by dropping and adding sports, I have suggestions on what to cut to allow all three in.

Add wrestling, drop taekwondo. I have nothing against taekwondo, I've gone with it mostly under the "last hired, first fired" philosophy. It also doesn't help that over a third of all medals have gone to just three competitors: China, South Korea, and Taiwan Chinese Taipei.

It'd be more fitting if wrestling replaced boxing, which has lost a lot of its luster thanks to issues with scoring and refereeing. But we'll stick to the LIFO approach for now.

Add squash, drop table tennis. I don't mean to be picking on the People's Republic, but when a sport sees more than half of its medals go to one country, you have to question if it has enough competitive balance to be part of the Olympics. Squash should be somewhat better in this regard, though recent world championship results suggest a fairly small group of countries at the top.

Alternately, you could drop tennis, considering that the Olympics is, at best, the fifth-most important tennis tournament of the year.

Add baseball and softball, remove field hockey. The most imbalanced team sport is probably basketball - especially on the women's side, given the recent domination of the US team - but it's too popular (and too lucrative) to pull.  Going through the other sports there's not a great argument to be made for getting rid of of any of them. I still think the best bet would be to move an indoor team sport to the Winter Games, but that's not likely to happen, so I went with what seems to have the least mass appeal of the team sports.