To find the real Dream Team at these Olympics you travel to the Fengtai Sports Centre Softball Field, a neat 10,000-seater ball park on the outskirts of Beijing straight out of Hicksville, Tennessee. Across the road is the venue for the basketball where the American Redeem Team, as they are known, Kobe Bryant, Lebron James et al, are on a mission to recover the lost gold medal of Athens.

No such carelessness in their women counterparts. While, in Athens, an NBA second team was idly losing to Puerto Rico and Lithuania, among others, on the way to national disgrace back in their homeland, the US women’s softball team completed a stunning 9-0 clean sweep in winning their third successive gold medal. You would need a whole Confucian scroll to list their records: most doubles, most triples, most runs batted in, 18 of them altogether. By the end of it, the US had conceded just one run, to Australia, and written their sport out of the Olympics. Softball will not be an Olympic sport in London 2012, which is, in part, due to the overwhelming dominance of the US team.

Poor Venezuela, making their first Olympic appearance, began to get the sinking feeling about, say, ball one into the first innings of their opening match in Beijing. The ball in question fizzed past the nose of their first batter, a 106kph fast ball launched by the six feet two inch US pitcher, Jennie Finch, who, coincidentally, was named sexiest athlete on the planet by the male readers of Sports Illustrated last year. Rounders this is not. Finch, a blond Californian, might have a smile to melt all-America and put a patent on the word "statuesque", but she has enough heat – as they say in baseball – to scare the hell out of some Major League sluggers when they arranged an exhibition game played under softball rules a few years ago.

Distraction was a valid excuse, but, rather embarrassingly for the mid-American male, none of them got close to hitting her pitches. Now, in case the BBC has missed the softball off their schedule, the pitch is one of the great bio-mechanical feats in the Games, a coordinated blur of leg and arm which leaves the softball – harder than a baseball, apparently – thudding into the gloves of the catcher at the speed of light and the viewer reaching for the slow-mo button. Don’t even think about rounders.

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The problem for the Americans is that the 11-0 victory over Venezuela, which invoked the mercy rule (if one team is ahead by 10 after five innings the match is terminated) rather proved the point that the IOC made when they voted by a majority of only one to consign softball to the ranks of tug of war, cricket and polo as ex-Olympic sports. The IOC should reconsider this one. Any committee that can end the Olympic career of Lovie Jung, the second baseperson for the US, has to get out more.

Jung, whose scampered opener brought the US a hard-earned victory over Australia in their second match today, is quite comfortably the most exotic creature at these Olympics. She might not talk a lot, according to her media biography, nor read much, nor like Christmas very much, she might have a passion for recycling and pitbull terriers – not much encouragement there then – but she’s a mean hustler on the field and one of the heartbeats of the US side. She’s certainly worth every minute of a mercifully smog-free afternoon spent in the bleachers at the Fengtai Stadium.

In all probability, the US team will trample the rest much as they did in Athens. They catch better, field better, hit harder and pitch twice as hard. Sheer excellence translates into any language. When Finch finally took her leave at the end of the fourth innings, her replacement, Cat Osterman, ripped a 110kph fastball past the startled Venezuelan. “We did not see many of her pitches,” Maria Soto, the Venezuelan first base, admitted after the match.

The Americans are not trying to chase the tails of the 2004 team, said Finch, whose husband pitches for the Minnesota Twins, nor can they be concerned about the absence of softball from the next Olympics. What are they expected to do? Lose? “Hopefully, they will reconsider their decision or bring it back for the 2016 Games.” If they are awarded to Chicago, you can bet your life on it. Lovie will be 36 by then.