I won't be suiting up for the Olympics any time soon--not that I've gone professional, mind you: No, my amateur standing is still very, very safe. It's just that my best event is surfing, which is not an Olympic sport.

I'm talking about channel surfing, but it would be the same with the other kind. Some sports are Olympic and some aren't. For example:

• Boxing is. Kickboxing isn't.
• Water polo is. Polo isn't.
• Rhythmic gymnastics, yes. Aerobic dancing, nyet.
• Discus throw is a go. Cow chip hurling, no.

What makes some sports Olympic? It all goes back to tradition.

The ancient roots
Ask Encarta and you'll learn that the Olympic Games are a revival of an ancient Greek festival that started in 776 BC. Those games differed a bit from ours. There were fewer events, many of which mimicked what you'd do in battle if you were an ancient Greek. For example:

In a battle you might ...	The ancient Olympic Games featured ...
ride people down with your horse	equestrian events
grab guys and throw them to the ground	wrestling
hit guys with your fists	boxing
throw big, hard, heavy things	discus throw
hurl your spear	javelin throw
run like crazy if your side lost a battle	foot racing
jump and leap as you run over the rocky Greek landscape	jumping

Every four years the Greeks gathered to compete in these sports. They came from city-states that were often at each other's throats, but during the Olympic Games, wars were put on hold.

Now, the games are put on hold in times of (world) war. (It's happened three times. The 1916 Games in Berlin were cancelled because of World War I. The 1940 Games in Sapporo, Japan, and the 1944 Games in Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy, were cancelled because of World War II.)

Sportswear was a bit different then, too. The earliest Greek athletes wore only loincloths; later they doffed even those for a more, ahem, streamlined look.

When the Romans came along, they were shocked by how the Greek athletes dressed (or didn't). The Roman emperor Theodosius I outlawed the games in 393 AD. And so, after lasting more than 1,000 years, the Olympic Games came to an end.

The heart of the Roman Empire had moved to Constantinople by that time, and the big sport was chariot racing, which was like a demolition derby in dune buggies without roll bars or seatbelts. Athletes got killed. Fans could get rowdy, too. In 530, rioting sports fans sacked the city and threatened to sack the emperor. A general named Belisarius ended the uproar by charging into the Hippodrome, one of the biggest sports arenas ever built, and killing about 30,000 rioters in one afternoon.

To summarize: The line between sport and war was thin back then.

The modern Olympics
Encarta reports that a French educator named Pierre de Coubertin founded the new Olympic Games in 1896 specifically as a vehicle for promoting international peace. The 1896 Olympics featured 43 events in 9 sports. The core program included both ancient sports, such as discus, and modern sports, such as jeu de paume.

No-longer-Olympic sports
Jeu de paume? Never mind what it was; it's gone now. (Just kidding. It was a forerunner to modern tennis.) Lots of sports have been dropped from the Olympics over the years. Cricket, croquet, and golf departed after 1900. Lacrosse was dropped after 1908. Rugby and polo bit the dust in 1924.

Some sports were dropped for odd reasons. Take tug of war. Yes, tug of war was an Olympic sport once. But according to David Wallechinsky's The Complete Book of the Olympics, tug of war was dropped after a dustup between the U.S. and British teams in 1908. The Americans said the Brits (big cheaters) wore spiked cleats (no fair). "Did not!" hollered the Brits. "Did, too!" shouted the Yanks. The British then dared the Americans to meet them in tug of war in socks. But the Americans said they didn't want to play anymore and went home. Tug of war was dropped from the Olympics in 1920.

Just because a sport gets dropped from the Olympics doesn't mean it stays dropped, however. For example, the oddly named sport of skeleton, a type of sledding event, returned to the 2002 Olympic Winter Games after a very long absence--the last skeleton competition was at the 1948 Games in Saint Moritz, Switzerland. Women's skeleton made its Olympic debut in Salt Lake City.

New Olympic sports
Overall, the list of Olympic sports keeps growing. Rhythmic gymnastics, synchronized swimming, tennis, and table tennis joined in the 1980s. Badminton, baseball, beach volleyball (!), and softball made it in the 1990s. Tae kwon do, trampoline, and triathlon debuted at the 2000 Games.

Prospective Olympic sports often appear first as demonstration or nonmedal sports before becoming full-fledged Olympic sports. Any sport is eligible to become a medal sport as long as it can be scored and meets certain criteria.

What criteria? Well, someone's got to apply: A sport needs an association or governing body of some kind to get in. Cow chip hurling, therefore, popular though it may be in the upper Midwest, probably won't make it.

A sport must also be popular in many countries--75 of them for men's summer sports, 40 for women's summer sports, and 25 for winter sports.

That's why lacrosse, the national sport of Canada, was dropped. American football is in the same bind. And I guess the caber toss won't be an Olympic sport any time soon. A caber is a spruce log about 6 m (20 ft) long. The sport consists of heaving this telephone pole end over end. You'll see caber tossing wherever kilts are worn and bagpipes played--but nowhere else, alas!

I do wonder, though, if all the Olympic sports have cleared the popularity bar. Take the biathlon, for instance, a combination of cross-country skiing and riflery. You ski for a while, drop to your belly, shoot some targets, ski some more. For each target you miss, you have to ski an extra loop.

Popular in 25 countries, they say. Well, it hasn't taken off in my neighborhood, I can tell you. I can't remember the last time I saw someone "biathloning."

Not-yet-Olympic sports
New technology breeds new sports. Fresh candidates for the Olympics keep emerging. Snowboarding cracked the Olympic lineup in 1988. Blading, thrashing, and bungee jumping can't be far behind. Blading is what you do on in-line skates. Thrashing is what you do on a skateboard. (I said you. What I do on a skateboard is called getting ready for the emergency room.)

What's next?
Hand-to-hand combat was a fact of life for the ancient Greeks, but life has moved on (for most of us). What facets of modern life will become Olympic sports in the future?

One model may be the Office Olympics, played at conferences run by an association of businesses around the United States. The Office Olympics includes such events as:

• The rubber-band shoot (knock Styrofoam cups off a shelf)
• The wastebasket toss (shoot balls of wadded-up papers into distant wastebaskets)
• The paper-clip race (try to make the longest paper-clip chain in the shortest time)
• The package lift (hoist big boxes, estimate how much they weigh before the UPS van comes)
• The clock watch (try to guess when it's five o'clock without looking)

Hmm. Some of that doesn't sound very athletic. Maybe in the Olympics of the future channel surfing will be a respected event. Hey, maybe I'll be an Olympian yet!