So, baseball and softball are no longer Olympic sports after these Beijing Olympics – too American and all, even though the Cubans, Dominicans, Japanese, Koreans, Australians and Venezuelans have all had medal-contending teams. I guess anything that has an American bent risks falling victim to the IOC ax. They are, after all, the same organization looking the other way while China exploits 11-year-old girls with baby teeth and passes them off as 16-year-olds, and they seem ambivalent as Russia, host of the 2014 Winter Games, rolled through Georgia like Rommel on the road to Cairo.

But, hey, they are the International Olympic Committee, so who are we to judge? But just for fun, since baseball and softball just aren’t Olympic enough anymore, let’s look at a few of the sports being contested at this year’s Olympics that show no signs of being eliminated from the international stage.

First up: Men’s Handball!

This isn’t what you think. In the world of Olympic competition, handball isn’t the game you played in an alley with a Superball and a flat wall. It’s not squash without the racquets. That is “American handball,” which comes, as do most Americans, from the Gaelic. No, Olympic is something totally different. It looks like a game an overworked recess teacher put together for second graders on a rainy Friday. Played on what appears to be a basketball court with small soccer goals on each end, players from each handball team, ball in hand, try to throw the ball in the opponent’s goal. Occasionally they have to dribble, but there is no firm and fast rule for when or how often the ball has to hit the floor.

That’s it. It’s not even as exciting as dodgeball, which would be great fun if the Ben Stiller-Vince Vaughn variety ever made it to the Olympic Games. Handball is second only to curling and shuffleboard in its total lack of athleticism, and sheer boredom to watch.

Adding a flavorful icing to the top of this turd, handball, originally developed in the 19th century in Denmark, Germany and Sweden, made its Olympic debut in the 1936 Games in Berlin at the insistence of Adolf Hitler, who was a big fan. Today, the dominant teams are France, Croatia, and Iceland. It is bound to be a riveting final.

But not nearly as spellbinding as rhythmic gymnastics, that silly display where people prance around with ribbons and sticks. There are, in fact, five apparatuses in rhythmic gymnastics: ribbons, batons, hoops, and balls, but the thing still looks like a halftime show at an Alabama football game.

According to a quick Wikipedia search, rhythmic gymnastics “grew out of the ideas of I.G. Noverre (1722–1810), Francois Delsart (1811–1871), and R. Bode (1881), who all believed in movement expression, where one used dance to express oneself and exercise various body parts. Peter Henry Ling further developed this idea in his 19th-century Swedish system of free exercise, which promoted ‘aesthetic gymnastics’, in which students expressed their feelings and emotions through bodily movement.”

But hitting a high-inside fastball on a 3-2 count isn’t “Olympic” enough.

Finally, trampoline.

Ok, seeing the Chinese do flips is fun TV, but so is watching people tumble off big red balls on that ABC show “Wipeout.” Trampoline isn’t an Olympic sport! It’s a backyard pastime to keep ADHD 10-year-olds away from the Nintendo!

You want a real Olympic-worthy sport? Try combing all three: lets have a rhythmic gymnast jump off a platform, through a hoop, onto a trampoline, and throw a ball into a soccer goal while doing as many flips twists and turns as possible. Now that would be must see TV!

Until then, the IOC should keep baseball. At least the scores aren’t subject to “aesthetic expressions.”