The BCCI has agreed to field both their Men’s and Women’s cricket teams at the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028, provided the sport is included in the Games again. Cricket has not been included in the Summer Olympics since 1900, but the ICC hopes it will once again be on the list in seven years’ time.
The Olympics consists of certain core sports, like athletics, aquatics, cycling, fencing, and gymnastics. Others are added on a discretionary basis, depending on demand, sporting interest and whether they have an appropriate governing body. For example, for this year’s Tokyo Games – presuming that they go ahead as planned – the sporting disciplines that have been added are baseball/softball, karate, rock climbing, skateboarding, and surfing.
The ICC has recently formed a committee to explore the feasibility of cricket being admitted back into the Olympics after a gap of more than a century.
One of the major stumbling blocks was the BCCI’s reluctance to put itself under the aegis of NADA (The National Anti-Doping Agency). This has now been overcome, and India’s willingness to submit two teams is regarded as a major boost for the ICC’s hopes of getting the sport readmitted into the Olympic fold.
The BCCI has also agreed to field its Women’s team at the 2022 Commonwealth Games in Birmingham.
Cynics may argue that getting cricket back into the Olympics is a guaranteed way of improving the country’s hitherto poor record in the Summer games. For all the optimism currently doing the rounds about the medal prospects of the athletes headed for Japan, the fact remains that India has only ever won 28 medals since their first participation, in Paris in 1900.
Eight of India’s nine gold medals have been in field hockey, the most recent of which came in Moscow 1980. The other gold medalist was shooter Abhinav Bindra in 2008 in Beijing.
Including what is de facto the national sport in the Olympics seems a near-guaranteed way of improving this medal haul every four years.