LA 2028: The New Olympic Sports and What Their Inclusion Reveals

Olympic programmes used to change slowly and from the centre. That changed when host organising committees won the right to propose additional sports for their own edition, a reform intended to let each Games reflect local culture and, less delicately, local commercial reality. The Los Angeles additions are the clearest illustration yet of what that power is actually used for.

The five additions

• Flag football — the non-contact, five-a-side variant of American football, with a ready-made domestic audience and the sport's professional infrastructure behind it.
• Cricket, in the twenty-over format, which brings the single largest television market outside the host country into the Games' commercial calculations.
• Squash, a long-standing candidate finally admitted after repeated unsuccessful bids across previous cycles.
• Lacrosse in its six-a-side form, with deep roots in North America and a compressed format built for broadcast windows.
• Baseball and softball, returning as they typically do when a host nation cares about them and disappearing when one does not.

Why cricket matters most

Of the five, cricket is the one with genuine structural consequences. The sport's audience is concentrated in markets where Olympic broadcast rights have historically been undervalued relative to population. Introducing a cricket competition creates a reason for hundreds of millions of viewers to engage with the Games directly, and it gives rights negotiators a new asset in the next cycle. The scheduling and venue implications are awkward — the format still requires a proper surface and a long competition window — but the commercial logic overwhelms the operational difficulty.

A sport is added when someone can explain, in a sentence, which audience it brings. Sporting merit is necessary but has never been sufficient.

The cost of a bigger programme

Every addition consumes athlete quota, venue days and village capacity, all of which are capped. In practice that means new sports arrive at the expense of participant numbers elsewhere, either through reduced entries in existing disciplines or tighter qualification standards. Federations for established sports lobby hard against this precisely because the arithmetic is zero-sum, and the host's prerogative gives them limited recourse.

What happens after 2028

Host-selected sports do not automatically persist. Several disciplines added under this mechanism have appeared once and vanished, which creates a difficult incentive for athletes: four years of specialised preparation for a competition that may not exist in the next cycle. Squash's inclusion after decades of campaigning is the strongest test of whether the mechanism can produce lasting change or only temporary showcases. The federations that treat 2028 as a permanent arrival rather than a single opportunity are the ones most likely to be disappointed.