There will, of course, be snickers in some quarters when a man by the name of Dick Pound dares to stand up and say "Size matters."

But not here, not when the man is the Canadian voice on the International Olympic Committee and he is speaking for those of us who believe it is well past time to shrink the Olympic Games.

Later this week in Mexico City, where the IOC is meeting, Mr. Pound will table a report in which he will argue that the Olympics have reached a "critical size."

The time has come to make the Games more affordable, and to begin culling the events before we see gold medals being awarded in mall walking and spelling bees.

It is hard to believe what can happen to a good idea in 106 years. When the modern Games began in Athens in 1896, there were approximately 300 athletes (the exact number is disputed) from a dozen or so countries, and the athletes, all male, competed in nine sports: swimming, cycling, track, fencing, shooting, weightlifting, gymnastics, wrestling and lawn tennis.

In 1948, roughly the halfway point of the reborn Games, there were 4,100 athletes in London. By Sydney 2000, the number had surged to 10,650 -- with 22,000 accredited media to record their every word and action.

No one expects Athens 2004 to suddenly revert to the original Greek Olympiad of 776 BC: one event, the 200-pace race, won by Coroibus of Elis, a cook.

But Mr. Pound should take comfort in the fact that the Olympics have long been fiddled with, even though they did, apparently, remain a single event for decades. Someone, however, eventually thought to add chariot racing, and it wasn't too long before beach volleyball seemed a perfectly sensible suggestion.

Recommendations are still out there, all of them seriously held by advocates. There was even a rumour, at one point, that ballroom dancing had become an Olympic event. Both cheerleading and chess have sought to make cases for their "sport."

The criterion once was that a sport had to be played by at least 75 countries on four continents, but beach volleyball -- added in Atlanta in 1996 -- put an end to that silly notion. The new criterion was simply: Did it make good television?

Nothing will change quickly. All events are "frozen" for Athens and changes, however slight, will be possible only for the 2008 Beijing games. The IOC is said to be leaning toward dumping baseball, softball and modern pentathlon, but it's also supposedly talking about adding golf and rugby.

Mr. Pound needs to get as tough on bad events as he has tried to be on drugs.

Canadian sportswriter Cam Cole once suggested that the Winter Games dump "any sport in which the competitors wear full makeup." We would add any sport specifically made for television, such as synchronized diving, which causes even the serious divers to giggle.

There are times when even those directly involved can no longer defend their sport's presence. It happened in Atlanta in 1996, when archery official Jim Easton acknowledged that bows and arrows were so "boring" to watch that the event should consider having, "archers line up on both sides and the last one standing would be the winner."

Television, of course, would heartily approve: a Survivor spinoff for the Olympic Games.

In the original Games, mule-cart racing was eventually dumped for lack of spectator appeal -- and TV ratings had nothing to do with it.

What Mr. Pound should aim for is a massive purge. It has happened before, right after the 1924 Paris Games, when 16 events were dumped, one of them -- cross-country running -- because it was killing the competitors.

There can be legitimate additions -- triathlon being a good example in Sydney -- but the IOC and Mr. Pound should work far harder to expunge rather than to replace.

Some of the events simply make no sense. The modern pentathlon, which is expected to go soon, is anything but "modern." It is, instead, an old military test to find the soldier best at relaying a message on horseback while fighting the enemy off with pistol and sword, then crossing a river and dashing 4,000 metres through the woods.

It will go, and there will be protests.

But we presume there were loud protests back in 1900, when the live pigeon shoot was dropped as an Olympic sport.

It was, then, the right thing to do.

Just as now, shrinkage is the right way to go.