The Olympics gets into a mess with its Los Angeles sports programme

Although they are five years away, the Los Angeles Olympic Games organising committee is due to decide shortly which additional sports it would like to add to the event. Unfortunately, as is often the case with the Olympic sports programme, they are the International Olympic Committee (IOC) are getting into a complete mess.

A new process was introduced for the Tokyo Olympics to allow the local organising committee to choose new sports for their games. These sports wouldn’t be permanent Olympic sports, but would sit on the programme for one games only, under the pretence that they added local interest to the event.

They also served another useful purpose for the IOC. It allowed them to get new sports on the roster without having to get rid of an existing sport. In the previous ten years this had increasingly become a headache for the IOC, which wanted to make the programme more modern, urban and youthful but was finding it increasingly difficult to cut sports given the fact that many of these sports rely on their Olympic status to be commercially viable at all.

The IOC tried to cut wrestling, before bringing it back before it had missed an Olympics. Modern Pentathlon is always teetering on the edge of exclusion. Baseball and softball were excluded after the Beijing Olympics and boxing and weightlifting have provisionally been excluded from the Los Angeles games, although it is likely that both will end up in the games in the end.

As a result of this failure to remove sports, the IOC couldn’t bring in new sports without increasing the already bloated size of the games.

As a result the event concept was developed and Tokyo was the first Olympics to take advantage of it.  It  added surfing, sport climbing, skateboarding, karate and Baseball/Softball. This together with the addition of a number of mixed events in several sports increased the size of the games by 10%. Up to 339 events and 11,500 athletes.

Predictably surfing, skateboarding and surfing have now been co-opted onto the full Olympic programme, meaning the games are getting bigger and bigger.

To avoid this ballooning out of control the IOC decided to put a limit on the number of total athletes that could attend the LA games - 10,500. With the organising committee able to include new sports as long as that quota wasn’t breached.

However even this approach doesn’t appear to be working. Last year the LA2028 organising committee (LA28OC) proposed 9 potential new sports for their games :- Cricket, Flag Football, Lacrosse, Baseball/Softball(excluded once more for Paris 2024) Karate, Motorsports, Squash, Breaking (included in the Paris Olympics) & Kickboxing.

Although there has been no official announcement, the noise coming out of Los Angeles is that the LA organising committee want breaking, baseball/softball and flag football (a short and non contact form of American football) in the games. This seems natural given the local interest in most of those sports.

However the IOC desperately wants to include T20 cricket (primarily due to the huge potential Indian and subcontinental market) and is hoping that it can get it in the games via this method. With the 2032 games in Australia and a likely bid from India for the 2036 games, the IOC can probably cement its place on the games in the near future if it appears on the 2028 schedule.

Given the IOC cap of 10,500 athletes, it will be almost impossible to include 4 new team sports in the games, not without significantly limiting the already squashed quotas for many other sports.

A meeting set for the 8th September to agree and announce the proposed new sports has been postponed, hinting that there is severe disagreement between the IOC and the LA28 organising committee. The Times of London recently reported that the compromise sought by the LA28OC was that they would accept Cricket if the IOC accepted flag football and a higher overall athlete quota.

From the outside this seems like a delicate and difficult compromise, especially as the IOC doesn’t appear that keen on flag football in addition to baseball and softball. It appears that it will take some more time to sort out.

However history suggests that in the end all these sports will end up in the LA games and there will be closer to 11,500 athletes taking part (similar to Tokyo). Yet again the games will get bigger and more complex rather than smaller, more compact and easier for cities to organise.

Further growth in the size of the Olympic Games therefore appears inevitable. The IOC can’t withstand the constant demand for new sports whilst trying to stay at the forefront of changing global sporting tastes.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The Olympics could get bigger. It’s are still smaller in athletes and events than the Asian Games and last for just two weeks, far less time than World cups in any of the major sports.

A slightly larger, and possibly slightly longer Olympic Games, might actually be beneficial for the games in the long run.