BEIJING — All day Thursday, thirty-six men from around the world competed in modern pentathlon at the Olympic Games. This was the 22nd consecutive Olympics where men have competed for a modern pentathlon gold medal, if you’re scoring at home, but that doesn’t make the thing any less bizarre.

Here’s how the modern pentathlon goes. The men begin in the morning with a little 10m air pistol. They move on to some fencing epee. Then they swim a refreshing little 200-meter freestyle. After that they do a little show jumping on their horses. And finally they run 3,000 meters.

There are no jokes in the previous paragraphs. Those really are the five events of the modern pentathlon. I have absolutely no idea how these events ever got together — probably on blind date. I have no idea who competes in this sport, other than very rich kids named Winthrop who have butlers and stables and take fencing lessons. I also have no idea what’s so modern about swords, pistols and riding on horses.

Most of all, I have no idea how this rather snobby activity remains an Olympic sport, while a great game that can be played by anybody like softball gets thrown out like the groom’s old furniture.

What a world. It’s becoming more and more obvious that the decision makers at the International Olympic Committee went to sleep around the time when Grover Cleveland was president and only recently woke up. They’re still hoping to bring back barbershop quartets, women with parasols and candy kitchens. Hey, if they want to have something like modern pentathlon in the Games because of the connection to history, fine, whatever.

But there’s no explanation for having that sort of Richie Rich sport while discarding a sport as liberating and vivid as softball. Thursday night, that was all on display. You probably already heard that the United States softball team — considered by most to be invincible — lost its gold-medal match to Japan 3-1.

There are all kinds of ways to show you the shock quotient of this game: It was the first time ever the United States did not win Olympic Gold. It was the first time since 2000 that the U.S. lost an Olympic game of any kind. It was the first time at these Olympics that they gave up multiple runs (in fact the three runs allowed was one more than the total runs they had given up for the whole Olympics). They gave up their first extra-base hit of the entire Games (a double) and then gave up a second (a home run — the first they’ve given up since the 2000 Olympics).

Yes, it was a staggering upset, something resembling the mother of all Olympic upsets — the United States’ victory over the Soviet hockey team in 1980. And the scene afterward was powerful. And it should have been a huge momentum boost for Olympic softball. Here was the moment. Japan beat the United States. Everywhere you looked on the field, you would see players from Japan waving to the crowd and crying, players from the United States hugging each other and crying.

Trouble is, part of the reason is that everyone was crying is that everyone understood that this would be the last Olympic softball game played for at least eight years and perhaps forever. It was a hard thing to understand.

Some say softball was dumped as a relatively innocent bystander in the IOC’s grudge match against baseball. The IOC has good reasons for being upset with the baseball people. They have been talking for years to baseball chiefs around the world about taking the Olympics more seriously — that is, finding a way to send the best players in the world. Of course, baseball chiefs like commissioner Bud Selig aren’t about to let the Olympics crash their season, so it hasn’t happened, and the IOC is furious, and baseball had to go. Softball, it seems, was found guilty by association.

Others say softball was dumped mostly because of America’s overwhelming dominance of the sport. It was this line of twisted thinking that forced the American players all during the Olympics to tactfully apologize for being so good, and it prompted a couple of them to offer a weird kind of “I told you so,” after they lost to Japan.

“I think it’s interesting that everyone talked about how we win all the time and no one can compete,” American Jessica Mendoza said. “They proved today that teams can compete.”

But none of this gets at the point. Baseball has nothing to do with softball. And dominating teams and athletes are not only a part of the Olympics, they are the most celebrated part of the Olympics. The Olympics are supposed to be about pushing the limits and taking these games higher, faster, stronger.

No, the big thing the IOC is doing is missing out on the opportunity. They talk all the time about wanting to get more women involved with the Olympics — and then they eliminate one sport that features strong women. It’s crazy. I look at these Games so differently now that I have two young daughters who so desperately look for women to admire. They already have their mother, of course, and their teachers, and friends, but they want more, always more, they cannot have enough, I don’t want them to ever run out.

And at these Games, sure, they can look up to the gymnast Shawn Johnson, with her Iowa grace, or to sprinter Muna Lee, who finished one-hundredth of a second off a bronze medal in the 200-meter run on Thursday but smiled broadly because she ran her fastest time, or to beach volleyballer Kerri Walsh, who graduated from Stanford and is an actress and does a radio show and keeps winning gold medals. They can find swimmers they like, basketball players, rowers, pole vaulters, and sure, modern pentathletes, too.

But softball is real to them. Softball is a game played in more than 100 countries around the world — and especially in the United States. I would also like them to watch the Olympics and see someone like U.S. softball pitcher Cat Osterman, who is 6-foot-2, funny, tough, pretty, emotional, silly, smart, all those things that you kind of hope your daughters will be.

The IOC missed that. What a shame. When Japan shocked the United States Thursday on a rainy night in Beijing, that should have set up a great story line for the Olympics, that should have sent softball into the next stage. But there will be no softball at the next Olympics. If only they added an air pistol.