KYLIE CRONK has dreamed of playing softball for Australia since she took up T-ball in Toowoomba 14years ago. On August 12, at Beijing's Fengtai Stadium, Cronk will be part of the team that takes on Japan before an already sold-out crowd. It will be a euphoric moment, but a bittersweet one - softball has been axed as an Olympic sport.

Cronk, 24, is one of Australia's five Olympic debutantes in the team and has mixed emotions about her first appearance. "It was in the back of my mind when the team was being selected that it could potentially be my one and only chance to get to participate in the Olympics," she said.

When it comes to decisions on which sports are in or out of the modern Olympics, the competition is about more than going "faster, stronger, higher". Power, politics and ego play their part - and glad-handing helps, too.

Beach volleyball advocates successfully pushed for the sport to be included in the 1996 Atlanta Games in part by treating International Olympic Committee members to first-class return flights to a tournament in Rio de Janeiro and putting them up in luxury hotels.

There have always been mutterings about professional sports such as tennis being included, and synchronised swimming, where make-up and costumes are assessed along with athleticism.

Softball is already fighting to be re-admitted with a campaign under way featuring former IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch and a marketing office near the IOC's Swiss headquarters in Lausanne.

"The decision [to drop softball] came as an absolute shock," Softball Australia vice-president Darryl Clout said. "It defied logic when the IOC were talking about involving more women in the Olympics and they discard a women's team sport which had been successful by nearly every category the IOC looked for, inside and outside the Olympics' competition."

Aussie Spirit, the national women's team, has won medals in each of the sport's three Olympic appearances: silver in Athens in 2004 and bronzes in Sydney and Atlanta. There are more than 35,000 registered softballers in Australia, but interest has slid since the decision to dump it from the Games in 2005.

Most observers say softball got caught in a bitter row between the IOC and baseball, which is also competing for the last time in Beijing. IOC president Jacques Rogge said it lacked "universal appeal", despite having 126 national federations - more than baseball, hockey, sailing, rowing, triathlon or modern pentathlon. Softball also scored more hours on prime-time television than fencing, wrestling, rowing, archery, canoeing, or sailing.

Mr Clout said softball was a casualty in a war between the IOC and Major League Baseball about the league's refusal to make its top players available mid-season to the Olympics or to adopt the World Anti-Doping Code. "We were perceived by some IOC members as having links with baseball and baseball wasn't the flavour of the month," Mr Clout said.

Softball's demise can be traced back further, to the end of Mr Samaranch's reign in 2001. Under his helm, the Games grew at a great rate with softball, tennis, table tennis, badminton, baseball, triathlon and tae kwon do added to the roster. The Olympics blew out to 10,651 athletes and 28 sports.

Mr Rogge, Mr Samaranch's successor, warned of the threat of "gigantism" diluting the success of the Olympics and in 2002 the 100-plus members of the IOC agreed to cap future Summer Olympics at 28 sports and 10,500 athletes, and to conduct a review of the entire Olympic program.

At a 2005 meeting in Singapore, each sport was evaluated on criteria such as TV ratings, spectator attendance figures, media interest, anti-doping policies, gender equity and global development. Members voted secretly on which sports should remain for the 2012 London Games. Baseball and softball missed out.

Australian IOC member and former IOC vice-president, Kevan Gosper, said it is a "nonsense" not to have either sport in the Olympics.

"I was disappointed because softball is a very good female sport, very successful with a very good following," he said. "Baseball wasn't established in sufficient countries across the world and they were going through, I think, a difficult problem with their drug initiatives … softball got caught up in the wake of that."

New York sports business columnist Evan Weiner is less diplomatic: "It's all about egos and greed and money. Major League Baseball felt they were bigger than the IOC … so as punishment, because the Americans won many of the softball tournaments, the IOC said, 'We will shut down softball as well"'.

Australian IOC member Phil Coles suggests there was a silent push against softball and baseball from within the IOC's executive board.

"It was said softball wasn't universal enough, that it didn't have enough countries playing, but I could name a number of sports with the same problem … how modern pentathlon survived I'll never know."

The decision to drop softball and baseball left two free spots on the Olympics program but the IOC decided not to add more sports despite pushes from rugby, golf, squash, karate and roller sports.

Aussie Spirit's pitcher Melanie Roche, 37, said: "Missing out hurts. You love the sport and dedicate so much time to it, and the top level has been taken away from you."