Managua, Nicaragua, to 12 participating countries. In 1951, the Pan American Games were established and baseball was on the official program from the onset. In 1952, a Finnish version of baseball (Pesäpallo) was a demonstration sport at the 1952 Summer Olympics in Helsinki, Finland. In April 1953, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy and Spain came together to establish what is now known as the Confederation of European Baseball and organized the first ever European Baseball Championship a year later. The Baseball Federation of Asia (BFA) was founded in May 1954 as the second continental confederation under the umbrella of the IBAF. The BFA wasted little time in organizing its first continental tournament, as it celebrated the Asian Baseball Championship in December of that same year in Manila, Philippines. The exposure of baseball to an international audience continued at the 1956 Summer Olympics, which saw approximately 114,000 spectators slowly fill the Melbourne Cricket Ground to witness Australia vs. US in a demonstration contest in Melbourne, Australia. This crowd of 114,000 was registered as a Guinness World Record for the largest attendance for any single baseball game. (The record lasted over 50 years before it was broken at a March 29, 2008 Major League Baseball exhibition game between the Boston Red Sox and Los Angeles Dodgers that drew 115,300 people to the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.) Baseball as an Olympic demonstration sport was finally able to take its act to Asia at the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, Japan, where baseball was already exceptionally popular. At the following 1968 Summer Olympics, a selection of premier U.S. college players defeated the Cuba national team twice in Mexico City to win the tournament. In 1973, the IBAF added the Intercontinental Cup to its tournament program. In 1978, the IOC awarded the hosting rights of the 1984 Summer Olympics to Los Angeles, and Robert Smith quickly went to work, in his capacity as a member of the United States Olympic Committee prior to becoming IBAF President, to reestablish baseball as part of the Olympic Programme. Smith reached out to the then-Los Angeles Dodgers owner, Peter O'Malley, and University of Southern California head baseball coach and subsequent College Baseball Hall of Fame inductee, Rod Dedeaux. The group organized an IBAF congress the following year in Los Angeles in order to establish an Olympic Baseball Committee. Through these efforts, baseball was again categorized as a demonstration sport and