OLYMPIC SPORTS: Baseball, modern pentathlon and softball face a "close call" in their battle to survive as Olympic sports, International Olympic Committee (IOC) president Jacques Rogge said yesterday.

In an attempt to stop the Games becoming too huge to handle, an IOC meeting in Mexico City will decide at the end of November whether to back proposals to throw out the three sports.

The exclusion of the three sports for the 2008 Beijing Games was included in a radical IOC report published in August.

It also proposed adding golf and rugby union sevens to the programme but scratching disciplines such as race-walking and equestrian eventing.

The meeting of all IOC members on November 27th-29th will not make any decisions on adding rugby or golf which will be decided in Prague next year.

Rogge said the proposal to scrap two sports which were popular in North America - the home of most of the Olympic sponsors - showed the IOC was taking independent decisions.

No changes in the programme are planned for the next Summer Games in Athens in 2004.

The IOC is also considering plans to scratch race-walking, canoe-kayak slalom, equestrian eventing, a wrestling event, the synchronised swimming team event and keelboat sailing.

Rogge also said that Moscow's theatre siege in which 117 people died last week will not have a negative impact on the Russian capital's bid to stage the 2012 Olympics. Rogge said: "It will not have an impact in a negative way. People know terrorism is universal."

The US is set to decide this weekend whether to put forward New York or San Francisco for the 2012 campaign.

HORSE RACING: Australian jockey Jason Oliver (33) died yesterday from head injuries he sustained in a fall. Oliver, the brother of one of the country's top riders, died in a Perth hospital after failing to regain consciousness from a heavy tumble the previous day.

It was the second tragedy in the Oliver family. Jason's father, Ray, was also killed in a race fall in 1975.