No Longer Olympic Events

As I’ve written here previously, baseball and softball were recently voted out of the Olympics program starting at the 2012 games in London.

It got me wondering what other sports have been in the Olympic program and were later removed.

Here is an interesting list of former Olympic sports, with the year and location that the sport was last played as a medal sport at the Olympics indicated. (It should be noted that some of these sports were exhibition sports later in Olympic history, but were not granted full medal status.)

Cricket (1900, Paris)
Croquet (1900, Paris)
Golf (1904, St. Louis)
Jeu de Paume (1908, London) [lawn tennis played with hands]
Lacrosse (1908, London)
Pelote Basque (1900, Paris) [lawn tennis played with curved baskets]
Polo (1936, Berlin)
Power Boating (1908, London)
Rackets (1908, London) [indoor racket sport, similar to squash]
Rink-Hockey (1992, Barcelona) [also known as roller hockey]
Roque (1904, St. Louis) [American version of croquet]
Rugby (1924, Paris)
Tug of War (1920, Antwerp)

There are also many sports that were demonstration sports. Demonstration sports are trial runs at the Olympics to see if a sport has the popularity and the ability to graduate to a medal sport. Many current medal sports were once demonstration sports. I will soon give a Games-by-Games list of these sports.