While sitting back and taking in the best the world has to offer for winter Olympic athletics, the thought came to my head, could MMA ever be in the Olympics?

You would think it would primarily fit more in the summer games then the current winter games happening in Vancouver, but if they have wrestling and other combat sports, could we see the best from each country step inside an octagon or ring representing not just themselves and their camps, but their home nation as well?

For this to happen there are some barriers, but there is a lot of things already in place that would potentially make this easy.

First off, there is an extremely wide array of fighters that currently fight professionally. Just in the UFC for example, there are two American champions, two Brazilian and one Canadian champion right now. Obviously Brazil and the United States would boast the biggest rosters, but don't count out places like Canada, England, Russia and of course Japan who all boast some strong talent. With how many good fighters there are these days, the actual competition doesn't seem like it would be dominated by any single country, it would be spread out quite nicely.

Secondly, the rules of MMA are becoming more and more universal. It used to be that the rules organizations were different. Now the style that we see primarily used inside the UFC is most common amongst other organizations as well. It creates an even playing field for the competitors with prior experience under the same uniforms of rules.

And finally, they have boxing in the Olympics! With that being said alone, you'd think that MMA would work just as fine, but it's not the boxing you'll catch on Friday Night Fights, it's “point” boxing, where contact is barely made and if you were to see a knockout, it would probably be by mistake. The type of striking in an MMA fight would be far more devastating then a glazing blow with a boxing glove to your piece of head gear.

There would undoubtedly be some other barriers to having the fastest growing sport in the world in the Olympics though.

The first thing that comes to mind is fatigue, injury and frequency of fighting. We all know how demanding the sport is, we see how much is taken out of fighters each and every time they fight. I can't imagine doing that more than one time over the course of a month during the Olympics. Not to mention, there is no way I can see this being actually regulated and legalized for it to happen. After all the steps that have been taken for the sport to clean up its barbaric image, this would seem like a giant step back.

Even though I practically crushed my own dream of having MMA in the Olympics realizing it would never be sanctioned, what if there was a lead up to the Olympics, in the year prior and it was all qualifying fights that broke down fighters to seeds and they fought based on those seeds? For example, if Brock Lesnar won all his Olympic qualifying matches throughout the year, and Shane Carwin won all his, then they would meet and fight for an Olympic gold medal.

Of course this is all hypothetical and would take years to orchestrate, and very well not even happen but I don't think it's out of the question that some day we may see MMA make an appearance at the Olympics.