London 2012 Olympics: Lesser-Known Events You Don't Want to Miss

If you are a true sports fanatic, you've just got to love the Olympics, especially in today's media-driven age. Every four years, the elite athletes who don't compete in revenue-generating, professional team sports finally get to step forward and claim their moment of glory.

Swimmers, gymnasts and track stars take center stage and at least a few of them earn their way onto Wheaties boxes. Weightlifters and amateur wrestlers finally get the opportunity to strut their stuff upon the big stage.

But with so many competitions crammed into such a short period of time, many worthy events still remain regrettably obscure. The athletes in these sports have put in the same countless hours and made the same kind of sacrifices that all elite athletes make.

And if you really love pure competition, their sports are compelling and entertaining.   

Handball

Calling handball "a lesser known sport" is probably a little bit misleading. It is a lesser known sport in the United States. Globally, it is pretty popular. 

This is a case where our "American exceptionalism" is causing us to miss out. Because, holy cow, handball rocks!

As can be seen in the linked video, it's sort of a combination of basketball and indoor lacrosse (which should also be more popular, in my opinion).

It has everything fans love about sports: thrilling explosiveness and agility, coordinated teamwork and dramatic, isolated, one-on-one playmaking.

I almost feel like it's just a matter of historical accident that we don't have a popular, professional handball league in the United States. Imagine LeBron James or Kobe Bryant playing this sport.

Canoe Slalom

Canoe Slalom is a beautiful pure sport. The athletes must combine skillful technique with impressive upper-body strength and stamina. 

I also like it because it is one of those sports that isn't just a game: the real-life, practical skills it evolved from are clearly apparent, just as with sports like track and field, wrestling, or rodeo. 

It is a reminder of the time when travel by inland waterway was an essential part of human existence. Navigating up and down rivers was an important job for centuries, and men who are good at their work have always enjoyed competing against other men who were good at it, just to see who was best. 

I've seen guys compete against each other with backhoes or at scraping paint off from houses. I had a miserable job unloading tractor-trailer trucks one summer that suddenly became great fun when a guy working next to me started claiming he could unload his truck faster.

Canoe slalom is one of those sports that wasn't invented as a form of pure recreation (not that there's anything wrong with that at all). It evolved from an earlier time when serious, hard-working men were simply trying to add a touch of levity and enjoyment to their tough lives.  

Water Polo

Unlike handball, I can understand why water polo lags behind many other sports when it comes to spectator appeal. A lot of the time it just looks like a bunch of guys in swim caps, bobbing up and down in a pool and chasing a ball. 

But if you look closer, you will see an extremely tough, physical sport. The non-stop swimming and treading water is punctuated with explosive, self-propelled leaps upward. Nobody is doing that for more than a few minutes unless he is a supremely well-conditioned athlete. 

Underneath the surface of the water, the competitors hammer on each other like it's a back alley, pickup basketball game. The creator of the linked video makes the claim that water polo "is the toughest sport on earth."

I know plenty of football and rugby players who would disagree with him, along with wrestlers, boxers and bull riders, just to name a few. 

But it's not an absurd claim, either. To play water polo at the Olympic level, you've got to be a pretty special athlete with a rare skill set. 

Trampoline

Gymnastics itself is among the most popular of Olympic sports, particularly the women's end of the sport. Decades after they won gold, Olympic gymnasts like Mary Lou Retton and Nadia Comaneci remain close to household names, at least with serious sports fans. 

The trampoline is the step-child of the gymnastics field. The wild, crazy, extremely fun step-child. 

Competitors in this event leap up about three stories into the air and then contort their bodies into a dazzling array of positions before gracefully landing on their feet. It's a more impressive spectacle live than on television, but even in HD, it's something to see. 

This sport was only introduced in 2000, so I wouldn't be surprised to see it take off in popularity, especially since it is already associated with one of the Game's most celebrated events. 

Modern Pentathalon

If the Dos Equis "Most Interesting Man in the World" character were an Olympic competitor, this would be his sport. It is a kind of ultimate competition in old school bad-assery. 

By combining pistol shooting, fencing, horse jumping, swimming and running, the event hearkens back to the time when elite cavalry soldiers won wars, made empires and shaped human destiny.

It also requires an athlete to be very good at a variety of unrelated events. Not surprisingly, it tends to be dominated by the Eastern Europeans, who also usually rule in such classic tests of macho as wrestling and weight lifting.