Five new sports will appear at the Olympic Games (OG) in Los Angeles in 2028. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) adopted the program on Monday, October 16, which had already been validated the previous Friday by its executive board. gathered in Bombay, India, on the occasion of the 141st session of the body.
The Californian event will therefore offer cricket competitions, baseball-softball, squash, flag football – non-contact American football – and lacrosse – a team sport derived from Native American cultures. In its shortened form known as “T20”, cricket returns to the Olympic Games more than a century after its brief appearance during the Parisian edition of 1900, the time of a match won by the English against the French.
“Cricket has more than 2.5 billion fans worldwide and represents an extraordinary opportunity to engage new countries and communities, including the host country of this [IOC] session: India,” touted the Austrian Karl Stoss, president of the Olympic Program Commission.
Popular throughout the Commonwealth, this batting sport can already hope to be renewed in 2032 in Brisbane (Australia), before integrating, perhaps definitively, the Olympic program. Because India, the largest country to have ever hosted the Games, took advantage of the opening ceremony of the Bombay meeting to present its candidacy to organize the 2036 edition.
A record name of disciplines
In addition to cricket, baseball-softball and the game of lacrosse have already appeared in the program of certain editions of the Olympic Games. The first was one of the disciplines of the Tokyo Games in 2021. In a column in Le Monde in July, Pauline Londeix, founder of the think tank O2 Sport, believed that flag football was “a sport of the future”, characterized by greater respect for bodies and athletes and which values ??technical gestures, “such as avoidance, body feints, interceptions, reactivity and explosiveness, anticipation and tactics”.
The new arrivals bring the number of disciplines on the Los Angeles menu to 35 – even 36 – a historic record. Because the IOC has at the same time confirmed the maintenance of modern pentathlon and weightlifting, which were in the hot seat, while postponing its decision on boxing.
“We want boxing on the program. We have no problem with boxing or boxers, just a huge problem with its governing body,” Thomas Bach clarified on Friday, leaving little doubt about its long-term continuation. The Olympic body has definitively withdrawn its recognition from the International Federation (IBA) after a cascade of scandals. She is waiting to see if World Boxing, a young organization initiated by the American federation, manages to bring together enough countries to replace it.
