The International Olympic Committee (IOC) should ratify on Thursday October 12 in Bombay the arrival of cricket at the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, in a call to the entire Indian subcontinent which marks its desire to attract new audiences while preserving the tradition. Breakdancing, present at Paris 2024, is already bidding farewell to the Olympics.
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The IOC 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 following Games.
The additional sports are added to the 28 established Olympic disciplines. But they are often an experiment, like karate at the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo. This combat sport was chosen as an additional discipline, following a decision by the IOC taken during its 129th session on August 3, 2016 in Rio de Janeiro. Steven Da Costa, the first French Olympic karate champion, will not be able to defend his title in France. The fighter, flag bearer for the Blues during the closing ceremony, has long campaigned for karate to remain on the list of additional sports in Paris.
Los Angeles 2028 and its sports linked to North American culture or history.
It comes and goes. Breaking which is at the 2024 Paris Olympics will not be able to last long either. The discipline will not appear on the program for the Los Angeles Olympics four years later, the LA2028 organizing committee announced Monday, October 9.
The absence of breaking from the program of the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028 is a “ sad news “, estimated Charles Ferreira, president of the French dance federation, which still ensures that breakdancing ” will continue to develop » after Paris 2024.
Appearing at the Buenos Aires Youth Olympic Games in 2018, this sport dance discipline from urban culture and hip-hop has been regularly highlighted by the IOC as an example of its desire to develop urban sports, pleasing for young people and requiring little equipment. But the Los Angeles 2028 organizing committee has chosen other sports particularly linked to North American culture or history.
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. Could it be more of a strategy to sell television rights to India?
► Also read: What is cricket, this sport for which India organizes the World Cup?
The only cricket event at the Olympic Games took place in 1900 in Paris, with two men’s teams competing in a single match. His return could, given his immense popularity in the Indian subcontinent, give the Olympics more visibility as this part of the world remains most impervious to the Olympics. Only 48th in the medal table for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, India has never hosted the Games.
Deciding the Fate of Weightlifting
India, which has just dethroned China as the most populous country in the world, is hosting the Cricket World Cup until November 19, bringing together up to 130,000 people in one of its arenas in Ahmedabad (city in the state of Gujarat, in the northwest of the country), a crowd that would put Fifa and its Football World Cup to shame.
Cricket will not be the only issue for the executive board, which must find a balance between the desire of many international federations to be at the Games and the concern to maintain a quota of around 10,500 athletes.
The body will have to decide in particular the fate of weightlifting, undermined by doping. The modern pentathlon, invented by Pierre de Coubertin but discredited in Tokyo by accusations of animal abuse, is also at the heart of the debates. The modern pentathlon made its debut on the Olympic program in Stockholm 1912. Boxing, a historic and popular Olympic sport, assured for several months of being in Los Angeles, is on borrowed time regarding its future. Indeed, the historic federation (AIBA), led by a Russian close to the Kremlin, lost its Olympic recognition after a cascade of scandals relating to governance and arbitration.