Olympic sports
Flag football and squash will make their debuts at the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, while cricket and lacrosse will return after long absences.
However, the 1904 organizers marginalized this aspect of the Olympics, and it quickly faded away after a few years, with mainly only Western sports being played.
Other notable multi-discipline sports are gymnastics (artistic, rhythmic, and trampoline), cycling (road, track, mountain, and BMX), volleyball (indoors and beach), wrestling (freestyle and Greco-Roman), canoeing (flatwater and slalom), and bobsleigh (includes skeleton).
[11] The opportunity to propose additional sports to the programme is at the full discretion of the respective Organising Committee of the Olympic Games and subject to the final decision of the IOC Session.
[12] In the past, several criteria concerning widely practiced sports, disciplines or events have been abolished.
Early Olympic Games prior to World War II included eight sports that have since been discontinued from the Olympics: basque pelota, croquet, jeu de paume, polo, rackets, roque, tug of war and water motorsports.
[4] These sports were removed because of lack of interest or the absence of an appropriate governing body,[4] and are considered unlikely to ever return.
[23] Some such sports, like baseball and curling, were later added to the official Olympic program (in 1992 and 1998, respectively).
[25][26] Women first competed in the 1900 Olympic Games, participating in five sports (croquet, sailing, tennis, golf and equestrian).
The sports of baseball and softball were both voted off the program by the IOC Session in Singapore on 11 July 2005,[28] a decision that was reaffirmed on 9 February 2006.
This was the first time a sport or discipline had been removed from the Olympic program since canoe slalom after 1972 (though it returned in 1992).
On 13 August 2009, the IOC Executive Board proposed that golf and rugby sevens be added to the Olympic program for 2016.
For the 2020 Summer Olympics, the local organizing committee was thus permitted to add five sports to the program in addition to the existing 28, taking the total to 33.
[30] On 21 February 2019, the Paris 2024 Organising Committee announced they would propose the inclusion of breakdancing (breaking), as well as skateboarding, sport climbing, and surfing.
[40] On 16 October 2023, the IOC approved the addition of five optional sports for the 2028 Summer Olympics: baseball/softball, cricket, flag football, lacrosse and squash, while breakdancing was dropped.
[42] Since then, the number of sports contested at the Summer Olympic Games has gradually risen to thirty-six on the program for 2028.
[44][45][46] The following sports (and disciplines) make up the current and discontinued Summer Olympic Games official program and are listed alphabetically according to the name used by the IOC.
Events held during Games prior to 1924 are considered demonstration sports by some scholars,[59][60] though not by the IOC.
[61] Organizers of the 1900 and 1904 Olympic Games, which were staged in conjunction with the 1900 and 1904 World's Fairs, included numerous sporting events on an equal footing under their programmes.
[62][63][64] Historians generally regard many of these as not satisfying retrospective inclusion criteria to qualify as "official".
[67] A sport or discipline must be widely practised in at least 25 countries, and on three continents, to be eligible for inclusion on the Olympic program for the Winter Games.
Since the start of the World Games in 1981, 16 sports and disciplines that have been competed there – badminton and baseball (1992), beach volleyball and softball (1996), taekwondo, trampoline, triathlon, women's water polo and women's weightlifting (2000), rugby sevens (2016), karate and sport climbing (2020), breakdancing (2024), and flag football, lacrosse sixes and squash (2028) – have subsequently been added to the Olympic program.
