Sports the U.S. would be dominant in if they really tried

[BCWWF]

In Beijing I watched the French defeat Iceland in the gold medal match of handball, and it is quite clear that the only reason France and Iceland were in the gold medal match is because there's not very many teams playing. If the U.S. could convert some of the athletes who play college basketball to handball players, there is no way that Iceland could match the pure athleticism of them.

Another sport you hear often is rugby, but I don't think it would be the same. The U.S. obviously has some huge guys who are extremely athletic, but I think rugby is still too technical, and it's not like the Samoans and some of those guys aren't already pretty big.

Still, it'd be interesting to see Bryant McKinnie, Jared Allen and Reggie Bush out there.

The other big sport out there is cricket, but I don't think baseball would have any correlation and that the U.S. would have ages to go technically before competing with India and Pakistan and Australia.

Just to appeal to the other side of the world, I'm guessing that if other parts of the world put all of their resources and had good technical training (ie American coaches) that the U.S. would quickly lose its edge in baseball. You see how dominant Latin America has become in the past couple decades, I'm sure the same thing could happen in Europe or Africa or South America or Asia if they really put an effort into it.

All in all, this post just confirms that soccer/football is still and always likely will be the world's game. There is no other sport where you can put teams from Europe, Asia, Africa, South America, North America and Australia in a tournament and they all have a chance. Sure, there is an elite (Italy, France, Germany, Spain, Brazil, Argentina), but in a given World Cup, Korea, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Australia or Mexico all have a chance. I'm excited to see South Africa in 2010, because the World Cups outside of Europe tend to be more unpredictable.