Craig Reedie, a British IOC member, told NBC Sports he blamed the lack of major-league baseball players for the sport's exclusion from the 2012 Games. Similarly, Cuban Baseball Federation president Carlos Rodriguez said, "Those who bear most of the blame are the owners of the professional leagues who refuse to free up their ballplayers to compete."

Softball

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When baseball was booted from the Olympic program in 2005, it took its sister sport with it—a move that shocked even softball's elite.

The sport's surprising exclusion was chalked up to the increasing European influence within the IOC. Europeans reportedly held a near-majority within the Committee—a less-than-promising scenario for a game with larger followings in the Americas and Asia.

Dot Richardson, however, wondered if a force darker than apathy had been at work. "I've always seen in athletics an anti-American sentiment throughout the world—most of it is through jealousy or envy," the two-time gold medal-winning American infielder told NBC Sports after the announcement. Was it anti-American spite? Maybe. Team USA had, after all, nabbed gold medals at every Olympic Games since softball's first inclusion in 1996, and had outscored its opponents 51 to 1 in 2004. (The U.S. women remained undefeated at the Summer Olympics until the gold-medal match in 2008, where they fell 3-1 to Japan.)

Polo

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Polo experts say their celebrated Persian horse-and-mallet pastime saw its golden age come and go in the first 50 years of the twentieth century. Even in its glory days, though, polo had a spotty attendance record at the Summer Olympics, appearing at only five Games of the first 10 (1900, 1908, 1920, 1924, and 1936).

Polo's heyday ended abruptly in the late 1930s—probably a casualty of World War II, says Brenda Lynn, the director of development at the Museum of Polo in Florida. As times of austerity set in, she says, it became less and less practical to continue international competition of an expensive sport like polo. The logistical hardships and astronomical costs of shipping polo equipment (read: horses) overseas didn't help much, either, and the so-called Sport of Kings was discontinued as an Olympic sport after the 1936 Games. The greater international polo scene went dormant around the same time, and struggled to regain any momentum stateside until the 1970s.

Today, polo is enjoying a healthy resurgence worldwide: More than 60 countries are members of the Federation of International Polo, and the sport has its own World Championships. But, alas, polo is nowhere to be found in today's Olympic Games—except on the breast of Team USA's Ralph Lauren uniforms.

Cricket

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Cricket's popularity was so minimal at the turn of the century that the sport lasted only a single match at the Olympics: In 1900, the only two teams competing were an English and a French team (the latter of which, legend has it, was composed almost entirely of British Embassy employees). England won the gold-medal match by a whopping 158 runs—and after the almost comically one-sided match served as both its Olympic debut and its swan song, Olympic cricket was put out of its misery by the IOC. According to The Guardian, reports after the match summed up the contest as follows: "The French temperament is too excitable to enjoy the game, and no Frenchman can be persuaded to play more than once."