The International Olympic Committee (IOC) should ratify the arrival of cricket at the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles on Thursday, in a call to the entire Indian subcontinent which marks its desire to attract new audiences while preserving tradition. Concretely, the body meeting in Bombay until next Tuesday must validate up to five “additional sports” proposed by the organizers of the Los Angeles Games, disciplines supposed to reflect a local tradition and which have no guarantee of returning to the Next games.
But this category, which is added to the 28 established Olympic disciplines, in reality mixes ephemeral experiments – karate at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, breaking at the 2024 Paris Olympics – and the first Olympic steps of sports intended to be long-term . This is particularly the case for climbing, skateboarding and surfing, which appeared during the Japanese edition in 2021, continued at the 2024 Paris Olympics and included from the outset in the “initial sports program” of the 2028 Olympics – at the place of boxing, weightlifting and modern pentathlon, left on the bench while waiting to gauge their reforms.
Among the disciplines presented by the Los Angeles organizers are “flag football” – a non-tackle variant of American football -, baseball/softball, squash, lacrosse – a team sport derived from Native American cultures – and finally cricket, whose Californian roots are however not very obvious. Because it is above all for the IOC that the return of this sport to the Games makes sense: “The TV rights for LA 2028 have already been sold in the United States but not yet in India, where the arrival of cricket would guarantee much better audiences,” Jean-Loup Chappelet, an Olympic specialist at the University of Lausanne, told AFP.
Only 48th in the medal table for the 2020 Olympics, India is also the only major country with Argentina to have never hosted the Games. A gap destined to be filled from 2036, when the continental rotation will bring the Olympic high mass to Asia after the 2032 edition already allocated to Brisbane?