IOC Officially Approves Five New Sports to be Included at LA 2028 Olympic Games

In the 141st session of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), the Olympic Programme Commission and Executive Board officially approved the addition of five new sports to the Olympic program. The vote, which took place earlier today, marks the official decision to add baseball/softball, cricket, flag football, lacrosse, and squash to the schedule for the 2028 Olympic Games, which will take place in Los Angeles. This decision comes on the heels of the LA28 Organizing Committee proposing these additional sports last week.

Baseball, softball, cricket, and lacrosse are all sports which have been included previously at the Olympics, while flag football and squash will be making their Olympic debuts. For those who may be wondering, as far as the IOC committees are concerned, baseball and softball are a package deal, and therefore considered as one sport, which is why it’s technically five sports being added instead of six.

The addition of these five new sports for the 2028 Olympics is not unusual. Every four years, Olympic hosts are given the opportunity to add provisional sports to the core 28 sports that are included in every Olympic Games. The system is different than the “demonstration” sports in years past in that they’re given full event status, funding, and awards, but are not guaranteed continued inclusion.

There was an original list of nine sports vying to be added to the LA 2028 schedule, which means, of course, that four sports that were excluded. Those four sports were breaking, kickboxing, motor sport, and karate.

“Breaking,” or as it’s more commonly known, break-dancing, is an interesting case. Breaking is being included at the Paris 2024 Olympics next summer, however, LA 2028 organizers have now officially decided to leave it off the schedule for the 2028 Games.

On the other hand, surfing, skateboarding, and sport climbing were included at the Tokyo Olympics and were kept on the schedule by the IOC moving forward.

The decisions may in part be informed by the available venues in the LA area. LA28 chairman Casey Wasserman said they favored sports that could be played at existing venues in Southern California, which has been one of the core tenets of organizers’ planning of the Games. He has also emphasized the importance of choosing sports that are “played in backyards, schoolyards, community centers”.

SPORT-BY-SPORT BREAKDOWN

LACROSSE

A sport with North American roots, lacrosse was featured at the 1904 and 1908 Olympic Games and as a demonstration sport at the 1928, 1932, and 1948 Olympic Games.

Pros:

• This is easily the fastest growing team sport in the United States at the high school and college level, and the audience in the host nation is going to be big.

Cons:

• The sport is dominated by the US and Canada. Out of 14 all-time lacrosse men’s World Championships since 1967, the US has won 11 and Canada has won the other 3. The last time a non-American team played in the championship game was in 1994, when the US beat Australia 21-7. The final 4 in 2023 featured the US, Australia, Canada, and Haudenosaunee, a team representing the Iroquois nation. There are pockets of success elsewhere in the world (England, Israel, Japan), but by-and-large, Olympic growth areas like Africa and South America are not competitive.
• Big roster sizes – lacrosse’s standard international roster size is 23, which runs counter to the IOC’s recent goals of focusing on sports with smaller rosters, like Rugby 7s and 3-v-3 basketball.
• Lacrosse is a relatively-expensive sport to play, limiting its global growth potential.

FLAG FOOTBALL

The less-contact version of American football, flag football is growing in popularity around the world – especially among women. While you might think this was an American-dominated sport, half of the men’s World Championships since 2002 have been won by other nations (including three by Austria), and American women have only won 2 out of the 10 World Championships ever offered. Wasserman himself once owned an arena football league team, so this choice is near-and-dear to his heart.

Pros:

• NBC, the American host broadcaster, loves football. The inclusion of flag football also gives the IOC a juggernaut global partner in the NFL, which is pushing to grow the sport of football at all levels around the world.
• So-Fi Stadium, which will host the opening ceremony, is an NFL stadium.

Cons:

• While football is growing in popularity around the world, there were no women’s African nations represented at the most recent World Championships in 2021. The sport is starting to catch fire in Asia, but those teams were still largely outmatched by American and European counterparts.

BASEBALL AND SOFTBALL

Baseball appeared as a full sport at each Olympic Games from 1992 through 2008 and softball from 1996 through 2008, but both were dropped in 2012. Japan, a baseball-loving nation, brought it back in 2020, but Paris organizers didn’t pick it up.

Pros:

• This event will sell out instantly. If they can hold the games at Dodgers Stadium, it will be one of the more iconic venues in Olympic history. Organizationally, it’s easy – just send the Dodgers on a two week road trip and continue operations more-or-less as normal.
• Merchandise sales will be huge.
• It fits the bill of ‘backyard games’.
• More nations have become competitive in these sports since they were dropped from the permanent Olympic rotation, though both still have limited reach in Africa and South America.

Cons:

• Major League Baseball players, the best in the world, have not been included in the Olympics, limiting the starpower of a sport that should be full of it. Perhaps the MLB will see the value of changing that stance after a successful World Baseball Classic earlier this year that featured plenty of major leaguers.
• Big rosters mean lots of athletes traveling. Both tournaments had only 6 teams in 2020, which kept numbers down, but also really limited a lot of the excitement.

CRICKET

A cashcow that America and the IOC can’t ignore anymore, cricket is estimated to be the world’s second-most popular sport (behind soccer) with around 2.5 billion fans globally. It’s an almost non-existent marketplace in the US, but that is changing rapidly thanks in part to first-and-second generation Americans and the launching of a well-funded professional cricket league.

The IOC recommended a six-team T20 event for both men and women. T20 cricket (also known as Twenty20) is the shortened form of the game, lasting about two-and-a-half hours – as compared to the popular international Test cricket format which are scheduled across five consecutive days.

Pros:

• A lot of powerful business people, especially those of South Asian descent, are dumping money into the US pro league. This addition should accelerate that process.
• It opens up the massive Indian market of more than a billion people, which has so far been a tough nut for the IOC to crack.

Cons:

• It won’t have a big domestic appeal, yet. But it’s coming.

SQUASH

One of a number of racquet sports vying for increased international attention with a general rise in interest for the genre, squash is played by about 20 million people globally in more than 185 countries, making it arguably the most-global sport on this list.

Pros:

• Once considered a ‘rich man’s sport,’ which is arguably still true in some parts of the Northeastern US, squash has done a lot of work to move form the hallowed halls of private clubs into more public spaces, including rec centers and YMCAs. The equipment is relatively cheap, so for countries willing to invest in the public infrastructure (which again, is not that expensive, giving a small footprint relative to a sport like tennis), the growth potential is huge.
• A small playing surface means limited infrastructure costs.

Cons:

• Have you ever watched squash on TV? Bought a ticket to a squash event? I have, but I live 2 miles from the US National Squash Center at Drexel University. There is big potential for squash, but with padel, paddle, and pickleball occupying an increasingly crowded racquet space, it’s hard to see where squash is going to make its breakthrough among the younger demographic.