Cricket, flag football and squash among proposed additions to 2028 Olympics

The organizers of the 2028 Los Angeles Summer Olympics are attempting to dramatically reshape the future of the Games by asking to add cricket, flag football, baseball and softball, lacrosse and squash to the program, according to The Washington Post.

Many Olympic observers anticipated that the T20 version of cricket, flag football and baseball and softball would be in the proposal L.A. 28 leaders made to the International Olympic Committee on Monday. Cricket has many wealthy backers in India, getting flag football into the Olympics has been a top priority of the NFL, and Major League Baseball has wanted baseball and softball back in the Olympics.

But lacrosse and squash are surprises, mainly because the IOC caps the number of Summer Games athletes at 10,500, and L.A.’s proposal would blow past that limit. Organizers have been studying the feasibility of some disciplines in established Olympic sports (such as certain races or weight categories) and have considered pulling those disciplines to make room for the new sports.

Monday’s announcement did not indicate what events Los Angeles organizers are proposing to remove. The proposal will be voted on by IOC members Oct. 16, the last day of their session in Mumbai.

Two sports that appear to be out of the Olympics are weightlifting and modern pentathlon. Both had been left off the original L.A. program by the IOC, which has been troubled by doping scandals in weightlifting and by modern pentathlon’s decision to replace horse riding with an obstacle course. IOC leaders have promised boxing will be in the Los Angeles Games, but with a new governing body emerging for the sport, it was not in the L.A. proposal and probably will be added later.

“In building the Olympic sport program we were willing to challenge the status quo and think differently about what’s possible for the Games in Los Angeles,” LA28 CEO Kathy Carter said in a statement. “We approached the process holistically and authentically, ensuring that our decisions were grounded in the Games commitment to fiscal responsibility.”

LA28 chairperson Casey Wasserman long has insisted he wants the Los Angeles Games to at least break even financially and not leave a legacy of debt like many recent Olympics. Los Angeles’s last Olympics in 1984 made money through massive sponsorship deals and the use of existing stadiums and arenas. LA28 already has added several sponsors, but the kind of money behind cricket and flag football promises to bring millions more.

Cricket’s popularity has exploded in India with the rise of T20, the shortest form of the game in which matches take about three hours to play. India’s T20 league, the India Premier League, routinely fills stadiums across the country and draws such huge television audiences that several of its teams are valued at more than $1 billion.

India is now the world’s most populous country with more than 1.4 billion people, but it has little Olympic history. The IOC, desperate to tap into India’s booming economy, has become interested in adding cricket. Likewise, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi seems to want his country to have a bigger Olympic pedigree, potentially wishing to bid on the 2036 Summer Games.

NFL leaders have been pushing flag football for the past couple of years, believing it could be a way to get more American teenagers to play the game without the worries of long-term head trauma from tackle football. Perhaps just as important to the NFL, its executives have come to see flag football as a way to push into international markets that have little understanding of the sport’s complicated rules.

The league has been promoting flag football over the past few months by turning the Pro Bowl into a flag football game and running a huge commercial campaign. It also has worked to get flag football into schools in Japan and is trying to get it added as a high school sport in the United States.

Baseball has appeared in several Olympics dating from 1904 but had its biggest run when it appeared in seven straight summer Games from 1984 to 2008. Tokyo added it for the 2020 Olympics, but Paris did not keep the sport. Softball was played in four straight Olympics from 1996 to 2008 and also came back for Tokyo. Lacrosse was in five early Olympics, including the first Los Angeles Games in 1932, but disappeared after the 1948 Olympics.