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Every four years, they try desperately to earn a place at the Olympics, fighting each other every step of the way for that coveted spot. For those that succeed, there is unbridled joy. For those that fail, raw heartache and that all-too-often ill feeling at missing out.
To anyone who assumes we must be speaking about athletes here, think again. Because there is another cohort to which the above applies: sports. As with those men and women going for gold, each Olympics is notable for what is an ever-changing line-up of events.
It is no different in Paris this summer, with breakdancing – or breaking as it is officially known – makes its Games debut. And, like the controversial criteria by which athletes can be chosen to represent their countries, the inclusion of breaking on this summer’s programme has generated no little debate. Even more so as it has been dropped for the next Olympics in Los Angeles.
But how does a sport become an Olympic event in the first place? And, how does it then remain one?
These are questions even those involved with sports to have succeeded on one or both fronts struggle to answer amid a selection process that seems to alter whenever the time comes to determine each Games programme.
Criteria for new Olympic sports
Naturally, there are certain immutable criteria a sport must meet to become an Olympic event, some of which may be harder to achieve than is immediately apparent. Among the most fundamental is that the sport must be governed by an international federation (IF) “recognised” by the International Olympic Committee (IOC), something that can take many years. Another is that the IF must be a signatory to the World Anti-Doping Code.
In more recent times a requirement has emerged for the sport to be played at the highest level by both men and women amid a target of a 50-50 gender split at the Games. The IOC has also sent out a clear message that appealing to youth should be a “key driver for the Olympic Movement”.
That message has coincided with a radical revamp in the last eight years of how new sports are chosen for inclusion in the Games programme. Whereas the IOC used to be the sole arbiter on this front – for example when it came to rugby sevens and golf getting the nod for Rio 2016 – host cities have since been able to nominate sports to showcase at their own Olympics. That had seen Tokyo 2020 choose skateboarding, surfing, climbing, karate and baseball/softball, while Paris 2024 axed the latter two in favour of breaking. LA 2028 will drop breaking and bring back baseball/softball, while also adding cricket, squash, lacrosse and flag football – a non-contact variant of American football.
The long fight for recognition
Of those four, arguably no sport is better versed in the vagaries of Olympic selection than squash. According to Zena Wooldridge, the president of the World Squash Federation (WSF), its bid to get into the Games can be traced all the way back to at least the early 1990s. “We’ve had quite a few very, very close calls where we’ve not quite made it and there would’ve been a lot of disappointment,” she told Telegraph Sport. “And disappointment over the process as well as the outcome, I suppose.”
When breaking was selected for inclusion at Paris 2024 three-and-a-half years ago, after squash had been left off the shortlist for the Games, the latter sport’s three-time world champion Michelle Martin proclaimed it had made a “mockery” of the Olympics. Wooldridge, elected WSF president on the eve of that decision, said: “It’s very easy when you don’t succeed for colleagues to have a pop at whatever they can in terms of this not being fair. That’s the difference between winning and losing, isn’t it?”
Her sport had previously thrown everything at getting into the Olympics, including hiring the late Mike Lee, who was involved in London’s winning bid for the 2012 Games, Rio’s for the 2016 edition and Qatar’s shock victory in the race to host football’s 2022 World Cup. Squash thought it had a shot when wrestling was deemed unworthy of inclusion among 25 “core” sports that comprised the Olympic programme for Tokyo 2020. But wrestling was instead readmitted in a decision widely viewed as having been influenced by a Kuwaiti powerbroker called Sheikh Ahmad Al-Sabah, formerly a close ally of IOC president Thomas Bach and a key figure in bringing the Olympics to Japan.
Sheikh Ahmad was later convicted of forgery, while the award of the 2020 Games to Tokyo also ended up mired in accusations of bribery, giving squash every reason to suspect foul play when it came to its own Olympic bids. But Wooldridge said she had been unaware of any “backhanders and brown envelopes”, adding: “We all know that influencing happens. It does. It’s the way of the world. It happens in business, it happens in sport, it happens in all kinds of areas. And all sports will have their influencers, won’t they?”
Wooldridge estimated squash spent up to £100,000 – mainly via the personal wealth of one of her predecessors as president – on their failed Olympic bids before LA 2028 introduced rules for its own sport-selection process, all but banning paid-for lobbying. This helped level the playing field between squash and richer sports like cricket and American Football. “If it’s dog-eat-dog, we’re never going to compete in that arena,” Wooldridge said.
Access to new audiences
Unlike squash, lacrosse and flag football were admitted to the Olympics at the first time of asking – although the president of World Lacrosse, Sue Redfern, said its own ambitions dated back almost two decades. “All of our thinking was that we would not be able to be eligible for an Olympic Games before about 25 to 30 years,” she said. Indeed, it took until 2018 for World Lacrosse to be officially recognised by the IOC, despite the sport having been a key part of the 1904 and 1908 Olympics and an exhibition event at three later Games.
As a team sport, lacrosse also faced an added barrier to entry: an IOC cap of 10,500 on the total number of competing athletes. Lacrosse’s solution was to devise a whole new version of the sport, ‘sixes’, in which each team consists of six instead of 10 players. Similarly, flag football – which has been around for decades and last year even became the format for the National Football League’s annual Pro Bowl – also features smaller team sizes than standard American football.
Like the addition of rugby, golf and now cricket to the Games programme, the inclusion of flag football gives the Olympics potential access to the audience of one of the world’s most popular sports. The United States has always been by far the IOC’s biggest market, while 93 of the top 100 most-watched television broadcasts in the country last year were live NFL games. There is also the tantalising prospect of the US entering a basketball-style ‘Dream Team’ at a time when global interest in the biggest athletes has never been higher.
Brett Gosper was involved in flag football’s bid to get into LA 2028 as the NFL’s head of Europe & Asia-Pacific. He said: “We’ve seen a number of players go quite public on the fact that they’d like to play in the Olympics and be part of that. There are a number of areas we just need to clear on that to make that possible. And we’re hopeful we can get to that point.”
A share of the pie
The participation of a galaxy of NFL stars yet could deliver a multi-million-dollar windfall for the IOC. Yet, flag football is currently not entitled to a cent of that, despite revenues from the Games being shared with participating IFs. That is because only what are deemed “core” Olympic sports are deemed worthy of a percentage of what was a pot of $540.29 million (£471.6 million) for the coronavirus-impacted Tokyo 2020 and could be even bigger in Paris.
To compound matters, there does not even appear to be a clear pathway to becoming a core sport. The status was bestowed on rugby and golf after Rio 2016, something Gosper – who was chief executive of World Rugby at that time – put down to a quirk of timing due to the changes to how new sports were subsequently selected. But none of those to be chosen since have become core sports, with Wooldridge and Redfern speculating that it would take “three” appearances at the Games for that to change. Wooldridge added: “There’s going to be an increase from 26 sports in London to 36 in LA and there’s no more money in that pot and so the last thing they want to do is divide it up and give us a share when we’re the new kid on the block. We’ve got to earn that.”
You would think that the easiest way to do that would be for a sport to shine on its Olympic debut. But that is made impossible by a selection process for each Games that concludes before the previous edition takes place. Gosper, Wooldridge and Redfern respectively described that process as “a pity”, “unfortunate” and “a little bit chicken before egg”.
It is one that has left all three of their sports in a fight to convince organisers of the 2032 Olympics not to drop them from the Games programme. They have already begun their sales pitches, with Wooldridge revealing that squash was planning to use “artificial intelligence” and other “modern technology” to showcase to Brisbane 2032 how the sport would look in LA. Gosper is aiming to reinforce the sheer pull of the NFL worldwide. Redfern is seeking to highlight “one of the factors that host cities and host countries would take into account”.
As she explained: “Lacrosse is a medal potential in Australia, so we feel it’s another potentially strong country for us.”
Keeping the IOC on side
The IOC cap of 10,500 athletes inevitably makes the addition of new sports to the Games a potential threat to “core” sports on the programme, or disciplines within those sports. As well as the wrestling saga, boxing is currently not scheduled to take place at LA 2028 following a series of corruption scandals, while modern pentathlon controversially dropped show jumping as a discipline amid fears for its own Olympic future after a coach punched a horse at Tokyo 2020. The Charlotte Dujardin horse-whipping scandal, meanwhile, has already led to calls for dressage to be axed from the Games on welfare grounds.
The case of boxing shows that, despite devolving the selection of sports to host cities, the IOC ultimately still holds a power of veto it is not afraid to wield when international federations and even national governments fail to toe the line. Witness the IOC last year stopping London hosting Olympic qualifying competitions over the Conservative Government’s hard-line stance on Russian athletes competing at Paris 2024, following Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine – something that eventually prompted a Whitehall U-turn. Or the threat to strip the US of the next Olympics amid a row over the IOC-funded World Anti-Doping Agency’s handling of the doping accusations engulfing Chinese swimming.
Any sport wanting to be part of the Games would be advised to take note. None of Wooldridge, Gosper and Redfern said they had been put under pressure to ensure their sports aligned with the IOC’s stance on such issues but the latter added: “We’re trying to join it, persuade them that they want us and we hold the same values. There would be no benefit to us of being out of the accepted norms.”
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