Peru plays Canada at the Montreal 1976 women's tournament.

The birthplaces of basketball and volleyball are within eight miles of each other. Right up the road from Springfield, Massachusetts is Holyoke, where in 1895 a YMCA director named William G. Morgan strung up a net and invented a game called "mintonette" for businessmen to play over lunch hour. Morgan was a friend of hoops pioneer James Naismith, and his game came along four years after the first peach basket.

Morgan passed away in 1942, and never got to see his innovation gain Olympic status. Men's and women's tournaments were held at Tokyo 1964, and Japan immediately showed itself as a power. The men went 7-2 and won bronze behind the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia, but the women won all five of their matches and won 15 of 16 games.

A scene from the women's tournament at Seoul 1988.

One level of intricacy removed from football, the game that's so simple that the name explains it, field hockey is stick plus ball. Some believe that the name "hockey" derives from the shepherd's crooked stick (hoquet in French), but the real answer is lost to history.

What is known is that humans have been hitting balls with sticks, and trying to propel those orbs past each other, since the days of the Pyramids. The Greeks played it, early Europeans did too, and the British Hockey Association organized under a rulebook in 1886. London 1908 saw the start of Olympic play, when England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales took the top four slots. Germany was the only other country to win a game.

A face-off at the Berlin 1936 Games.

Etymologically, "fence" is the second syllable of "defense," and that's the most important thing in this discipline. Rule No. 1 is avoid being touched, followed closely behind by the necessity to score points yourself.

Swordplay as a sport first developed in ancient Egypt, flourished again during the Renaissance, and spread throughout Europe in the 16th Century with various handbooks and rules variations. A lot of these rules had to do with honor and valor, and pierced lungs and death were popular ailments of fencers three or four centuries ago.

The final push at the Tokyo 1964 men's road race.

The earliest bicycle types were only slight improvements over walking -- the 1918 Draisienne, credited as the first-ever cycle, had two wheels, no pedals and only really worked well on downhill slopes. But it was new and expensive technology, so all of Paris just had to have one of their own.

Pedals were applied about 50 years later, followed by experiments with high wheels, gears, sprockets and suspensions. By the time the 19th Century was over, the bicycle was a phenomenon all over western Europe. And as folks are wont to do with implements that can go fast, they were racing them too.

Yelena Antonova (URS) took bronze in the women's single sculls at Montreal 1976.

Perhaps it's because the passing of an oar through the water happens at variable speeds, depending on strength. Whatever the reason, rowing has always been a race, all the way back to the ancient boating sports practiced by Amenhotep and Virgil.

In 1892, the Fédération Internationale des Sociétés d'Aviron was founded by six nations. FISA is one of the very few international federations that predates the modern Olympic Games, and holds the distinction of being the oldest of the 28 members of the Association of Summer Olympic International Federations (ASOIF).

Aecio Morrot Coelho of Brazil, atop Guapo, clears a jump during the three-day event at London 1948.

Horses and people have been fast friends for thousands of years. Throughout human history, People have been riding them across long distances, putting carts behind them, pulling farm machinery with them. In recent centuries, humans have entered them in competitions too.

Most of what remains from equestrian's Olympic debut in 1900 is a stack of vague results. We do know that competitions were held in four subdisciplines, and that none of them (including a high and long jump) are no longer on the program. In 1912 at Stockholm, that's when modern equestrianism was truly born, when the three main events that comprise international competition all made their debut.

Ismail Bulov (BUL) and Istvan Kovacs (HUN) in the middleweight freestyle class at Moscow 1980.

Peel back the years of human sports history. Discard the drugs and the technological innovations of the past 50 years, the ballgames and amusements of the last hundred. Go past all the rules and point systems that turned survival mechanisms into breezy pastimes.

At the center of that great historical onion is wrestling, the simplest and most primeval discipline on the Olympic program. It dates back to the caves, when Cro-Magnon men would grapple over food, territory, or perhaps the cavegirl that would push the winner's superior DNA forward into the future.

A scene from the 1988 badminton exhibition at Seoul.

It may seem the poorer, stranger yet slightly amusing stepchild of tennis, but the truth is that this is the daddy of all racquet sports. Badminton is as Olympic as a sport can be without being Olympic -- the Greeks were playing a version of shuttlecock in the days of the ancient Games, but it never quite made it onto the program.

The game made its way east to the Orient, and west to medieval England. An early European competitive version of the sport involved hitting the ball back and forth between two people, counting the number of hits before the ball hit the ground. When and where the ball grew feathers is still unclear.

Kate Allen (AUT) wins the Athens 2004 women's triathlon.

According to triathlete Scott Tinley, author of the athlete memoir "Racing the Sunset," the triathlon began as a French event called "Les Trois Sports" in the 1920's. In the city of La Rochelle, athletes would swim the local channel, bike around town, then run laps in the stadium.

It never quite caught on. But a half-century later, the modern version of the sport had its birthday on September 25, 1974 when 46 athletes swam, biked and ran in the inaugural Mission Bay Triathlon at San Diego. It had nothing to do with "Les Trois Sports," it was just a way for health-conscious Southern Californians to mix up their workouts.

Great Britain's shooting team at Stockholm 1912.

Shooting rifles, pistols and guns dates back to the Middle Ages, but marksmanship is an art that took shape in the 19th Century, with local competitions and national championships. One of those expert marksmen just so happened to be the person who had the idea to bring the Olympic Games back.

Pierre de Coubertin was a pistol champion in France, and made sure that his favorite sport was one of the first onto the Olympic menu. Five shooting events were included at Athens in 1896, with a ceremonial start presided over by Queen Olga of Greece. The Olympic shooting competition predated the first world championship by a year, and the organization that would become the International Shooting Sport Federation was founded by eight national federations in 1907.

The women's 10 meter platform event at Mexico City 1968.

Danger! Beauty! Precision! It's hard to fully appreciate the art of diving at the Games, because every competitor has nailed months and years of spot-on dives to achieve that Olympic berth. Diving is measured in tenths of points, thousandths of millimeters and millionths of seconds. The degrees between perfection and disaster are difficult to calculate.

At Seoul 1988, Greg Louganis of the U.S. hit his head against the platform while attempting a 2 1/2-somersault pike before winning gold. Long before that, four-time Olympic champion Pat McCormick was a fantastically lovely woman who paid for her missed dives with lacerations and breaks. And Sergei Chalibashvili of the Soviet Union fell into a coma and died, after cracking his skull against the platform at the 1983 World University Games.

A Japanese archer takes aim at Munich 1972.

Human beings have been using bows and arrows since approximately 8000 B.C.. Once it was discovered that a fast-moving pointed object, propelled by a technological device, could kill meaty food sources (or enemy humans), people solidified their control over the earth.

When superior machinery leaves an object behind -- in this case, when the invention of gunpowder rendered the bow obsolete -- the displaced technology has greater freedom to become an artistic tool. Field and target archery evolved as a pastime in 17th Century England, in events such as the Scorton Arrow, which originated around 1673. It's considered the world's oldest competitive sporting event.

A pickoff play from the Japan-Australia semifinal game at Sydney 2000.

Softball was initially conceived as an indoor game in 1887. A gentleman named George Hancock, an employee at the Chicago Board of Trade, wanted to play some baseball during the cold Windy City winter; he started a pick-up ballgame in a boat club with a boxing glove and a broom, and a sport was born.

That much excitement can't be kept inside, however. The safer alternative to the flying hardball game of American rounders caught on quickly, known as Big Ball, Diamond Ball or Kitten Ball depending on where you were from. Nearly a half-century after its inception, the game was organized as "softball" under an American Softball Association, and a first national tournament occurred at the 1933 Chicago World's Fair,. It drew over a quarter-million spectators, many of whom took the game back to their backyards and started playing themselves.

Paul Anderson (USA) won the super heavyweight title at Melbourne 1956.

It asks one question: "That heavy thing over there. Can you lift it over your head?" In a world of complicated rules and regulations for various games, the crystal-clear simplicity of weightlifting makes it a beautiful sport. It's the Olympics' most boolean contest, one that only gives yes or no answers.

While humans have been lifting huge objects since the dawn of time, competitive weightlifting has only been around since the 19th Century. Because of organization that predates the Olympic movement, world competitions had been occurring for five years before Athens 1896. There were few common-ground agreements on what types of lifts were acceptable -- in Athens, a British athlete named Lawrence Levy withdrew when he found there would be no two-handed dumbbell event.

Nathan Brooks (USA) defeats Edgar Basel (GER) in the 1952 flyweight final at Helsinki.

The sweet science. Pugilism. Pygmachia. Fist-fighting. Whatever you call it, it's still two guys trying to beat the crap out of each other with padded gloves on.

Unlike, for instance, synchronized swimming and rhythmic gymnastics, boxing has roots that stretch all the way back to the ancient Olympics. The Greeks held organized fights in which participants wore leather hand-straps and other protective gear, and were forbidden to hold, grab or claw their opponents. After Greece's fall to Rome, Christian emperor Theodoric the Great banned the Olympics in 393 A.D. in his assault against paganism.

The start of a K-1 heat at Rome 1960.

Four of the 30 sports on the program involve modes of human transport (quick... can you name them all?) that are repurposed for racing. The canoe ended up being Native Americans' gift to both aquatic travel and the Olympic Games. While early craft were made of sealskin and birchbark, technology hasn't changed the way people get around in them.

Canoeing was recognized as an official Olympic sport in April 1934, and the Berlin 1936 organizers quickly put together a flatwater course. Rowing, the long-oared pastime that dates back to ancient Rome, had been contested all the way back to Paris 1900. But this was different: there were paddle blades on both sides of the oar.

Featherweight action at Sydney 2000.

The Korean symbols that make up "Taekwondo" (태권도) translate to foot, fist, way. The way of the fist and the foot has a mysterious and much-debated past, but it seems to have developed from several different philosophical strains of Korean martial arts. During the Japanese occupation in the first half of the 20th Century, the style went underground.

Martial arts flourished after World War II as Koreans made use of them to carve out a national and cultural identity. During the Korean War, the style that would later be called taekwondo became an institution, after South Korean President Syngman Rhee watched an exhibition in which a master broke 13 roof tiles with one punch. Rhee was so impressed, he ordered that the entire army learn it.

Germany and Sweden battle in the semifinals at Berlin 1936.

Handball was originally a tough sell to the Olympic movement; it was added as a concession to the German hosts in 1936, but didn't reappear until 1972. It might seem, then, that sporting folk in the early part of the 20th Century had little use for throwing balls at a goal.

But not so! A mere eight years after it was invented, a game the English initially called "aquatic handball" was added to the Olympic program. First held in 1900 at Paris, water polo would forever hold the distinction of being the first-ever team sport included at the Games. As is often the case when a country is teaching a game of its own to the world, Great Britain swept through the three-game tournament -- scoring 29 goals to their opponents' three.

North Korea's Hyon Kim fights off a German volley during the 1996 competition.

If you're reading this without the help of Google Translator or Babelfish, you're likely to call the game in question "ping-pong." Perhaps even derogatorily so. Before you consider this a "basement sport," remember that there's probably a treadmill near that dusty old ping-pong table, and you're not a world-class runner either.

Most world-class table tennis players these days are from non-English speaking countries, which is odd because this sport was invented as "gossima" in Great Britain in the 1880's -- as an after-tea amusement for posh folk, no less. It's said that early table tennis nets were made of books and a champagne cork "ball" was used. Players, apparently, were attempting to miniaturize the emerging sport of lawn tennis.

Keiji Suzuki of Japan wins the 2004 heavyweight gold medal over Russia's Tamerlan Timenov.

Judo can be translated as "the gentle way," and it was developed in late 1800's Japan as a gentler alternative to jujutsu. The father of judo, Kano Jigoro, built upon the foundation of that ancient weaponless samurai art, but invoked a strict code delineating between what is and isn't permissible in combat. While jujutsu takes a violent "anything goes" approach that emphasizes superiority -- allowing kicking, biting and eye gouging if need be -- judo is all about limits, efficiency, and discipline. As such, it's a "way of life" too.

A single men's judo open was added to the Olympic program in 1964, took an Olympiad off, and came back for the time period of 1972 through 1984. Since Seoul 1988, an array of tournaments for different weight classes have been contested. A practitioner of judo is a judoka, who wears a baggy, belted jacket called a judogi (or gi) while practicing the sport. Opponents, dressed in white or blue gis, attempt to deprive each other of balance on a square-shaped mat.

Tennis returned to the Olympics in 1988 after 64 years.

Tennis is another sport in which opponents attempt to propel a ball past each other, but there are two obstacles here: a short lengthwise net and surrounding boundary lines. Players are outfitted with racquets, and if one fails to return a hit ball into the enemy side of the court -- within the lines -- the other is awarded a point.

Players begin games at love -- or rather, "l'oeuf," the French word for "the egg," which is a very zero-shaped thing indeed. Mathematics and tennis, from that point, are at odds. In a game, one point is called 15, the second is 30, and the third 40. The reason for this is because a clock face was originally used as a scoreboard, and as the game developed, "45" was shortened to "40." One of the universal laws of sport is that terms are best if they're two syllables or less.

Sure, the decathlon is the ultimate in all-around achievement -- running, jumping, throwing, all that. But seriously, when was the last time you had to throw a discus or a javelin? The modern pentathlon was designed specifically to provide a context for athletic effort, and remains the only sport on the Olympic program with actual narrative structure.

The sport was created by the very man who revived the Olympic Games for modern times, whose heart is entombed in a box at ancient Olympia. Pierre de Coubertin wanted to put together a five-faceted discipline that would capture the spirit of the ancient Greek pentathlon -- in addition to four track and field events, that event incorporated wrestling. The pentathlon did not just train athletes, it forged warriors.

Sweden and Croatia clash during the 1996 gold medal game.

In an odd and roundabout way, the phrase "team handball" serves as another illustration of how powerful New York City is in American and Western popular culture. It's the center of the universe for gloved-palm court handball -- an individual wall-based game -- and the only reason why the Olympic sport needs an extra adjective (nobody says "team hockey" or "team basketball," for instance). For those who live outside the boroughs, it's a line of distinction that's unnecessary, and it's just another layer of confusion that exists between the U.S. and this great sport.

Handball, in a lot of ways, is opposite to football. On offense, you carry it, not kick it. Because of the speed of a launched shot, goalies rarely catch the ball in their hands, generally deflecting it with their arms and legs. There are a lot of rebounds in handball. Players on the attack cannot hold the ball for more than three seconds or take three steps without dribbling.

The regatta at Sydney 2000.

The entire sport of sailing is just asking for it. The very word -- or even worse, its alternate title of yachting -- practically drips exclusivity and leisure, bringing to mind Christopher Cross, rum-based adult beverages, and those "skipper" hats with the anchors on them.

Competitive sailing should quickly divest you of those notions. The individual events, in which participants use themselves as counterweights against the wind, are rugged and demanding. There's very little elitist about hanging out the side of a boat, held in only by a foot strap, and feeling as if your knees will never bend again for the rest of your life. Racers are given identical machines and required to use skill and wit to overcome the competition -- something that any NASCAR or Formula 1 fan should appreciate.

Cuban players celebrate during the 1996 gold medal game.

There are 30 sports on the Olympic program this year, and each will get a brief overview as we keep the countdown to Beijing going. First, one of the two sports that will have its last Olympic go-round at the 2008 Games (the very similar softball is the other).

The great ball sports that are played the world over -- such as football, basketball, even handball and table tennis -- have one simple thing in common: the object is to propel the orb around and past the opposition. This is what baseball is about, too, but that's the job of the defense; most ball sports give you points and wins for getting the ball past the enemy the most often. What makes baseball revolutionary is also what makes it confusing and obscure, and as such it probably doesn't belong in a global event like the Olympics.