Cricket to help them – Newspaper Kommersant No. 140 (7341) dated 08/04/2022

The program of the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics can be replenished with several sports, the penetration of which into the main sports until recently seemed absolutely impossible. For example, cricket, lacrosse and flag football, that is, genres with extremely limited geography, and even motorsport, which the leaders of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) previously spoke of as “by definition” not falling under the necessary inclusion in the prestigious list criteria. However, the decisions of the IOC regarding the previous summer Olympics, held last summer in Tokyo, and the next Olympics in Paris in 2024, show that the structure is ready for a lot to “refresh” the program and attract an additional, especially young, audience.

Portal Insidethegames has released a shortlist of sports eligible to compete for the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. It included cricket, baseball (and its female form softball), karate, lacrosse, flag football, kickboxing, squash, breakdancing and motorsports. All of them are allowed to submit official presentations, after studying which the International Olympic Committee in 2023 will make either a positive or negative opinion on each participant in the competition. They will be judged according to six criteria. Among them are the level of interest in the sport in the world and the host country, the effectiveness of its management and the ability to provide an “economical” presence in competitions in terms of monetary costs and the number of athletes involved. How many of these species can break through to the Olympics, it is impossible to say.

For a long time, the Olympic program was extremely stable.

It consisted of a large block of “root” species that for decades retained the status of species, to which were occasionally added either completely new to it, or those that were once in the program, but for some reason disappeared from it.

Everything changed in the middle of the previous decade with Thomas Bach as president of the IOC. Under him, the head sports structure adopted a strategy that significantly adjusted the approach to the formation of the program in order to “refresh” it and attract an additional, primarily young, audience, increasing, among other things, the commercial potential of the Olympics.

Now the program has become, in fact, “floating”.

For each Olympiad, a list of types and disciplines is drawn up, which, having proved their usefulness, can join those that form the basis of the Olympic Games. The public has already seen the results of this approach. The program of the Tokyo Olympics held a year ago included a whole scattering of types and disciplines that were either unconditional or actual (due to the solidity of the period that had passed since the last appearance at the Olympic Games) its newcomers. This is karate, and rock climbing, and surfing, and skateboarding, and basketball in the “three by three” format. And at the next Summer Olympics – in Paris in 2024 – the debut of breakdance will take place, which just perfectly embodies the youth direction of the IOC strategy.

A place in the Los Angeles program has already been booked for 28 sports.

If we start from the previous Olympics (in Tokyo, medals were played in 32 types, in Paris their number was increased by one), then half a dozen places are at stake. But an important nuance must be taken into account. In the preliminary version of the American program, there are no three “traditional” sports – boxing, weightlifting and modern pentathlon: the federations that control them are in crisis. At the same time, the IOC stressed that for everyone, if the problems are solved, the road to Los Angeles “will be open.” So the degree of competition among the nine “contestants” may be quite high.

It is impossible to single out among them undoubted favorites. Everyone’s background is about the same: kickboxing and squash have never been at the Olympics, the participation of the rest is either long-standing, sometimes dating back to the beginning of the last century, or episodic. Some, like the same squash or kickboxing, do not have a reputation for being extremely popular sports, remaining in the thick shadow of the “adjacent” ones – tennis, boxing. Some are in great demand, but in a geographically narrow space: cricket is adored only in Great Britain and its former colonies in South Asia – India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Bangladesh, lacrosse – exclusively in the USA. Flag football, similar to American football, does not even have a generally recognized governing organization. And about motorsport, representatives of the IOC have always said that it “by nature” is not suitable for the Olympics: they allow sports that demonstrate human capabilities, and not the capabilities of technology. But the Tokyo and Paris stories show that in reality the IOC is ready to do a lot for the sake of “modernizing” its main asset, and it seems that genres that are too exotic or marginal for it simply do not exist anymore.

Alexey Dospekhov