Cricket has won its battle to be added to the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic program, multiple sources told the Guardian, and will be joined by flag football as well as baseball and softball.
The Los Angeles organizing committee is expected to make public its choice of sports for the Games in the next 24 hours, suggesting that lacrosse and potentially squash could also be offered as additional sports for 2028.
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His decision, which follows intense discussions between Los Angeles and the IOC Olympic Program Commission, will be officially confirmed at the 141st IOC session in Mumbai, which opens on Sunday.
Cricket has already been played once at the Olympics, in Paris in 1900, when England and France played a single gold medal match. But in Los Angeles there will be a men’s and women’s T20 tournament which will open up a potentially lucrative commercial market in the Asian subcontinent.
Current Olympic broadcast rights in India are sold for individual Games and are worth just £15.6 million ($20 million) for Paris 2024. But industry experts told the Guardian that depending on the format and the number of matches guaranteed for India. , this figure could be worth up to £150 million if cricket is included in LA 2028 and then Brisbane in 2032.
Meanwhile, it appears that flag football, a sporting variation of five-on-five, non-contact American football, has also been given the green light. This will please the NFL, which has lobbied for flag football to be included as an Olympic event to increase interest in the game around the world.
However, the return of baseball and softball — and the addition of several new team sports — leaves unclear the International Olympic Committee’s hard cap of 10,500 athletes for each Olympics. If the Games do not want to grow, other sports may be forced to reduce the number of their medal events.