The International Olympic Committee approved five new sports for the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. These sports include baseball/softball, cricket, flag football, squash and lacrosse.
Many people may recognize baseball and softball as Olympic sports from the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, but the 2024 games will not include America’s pastime.
The 2024 games, in Paris, will be replacing baseball and softball with breakdancing. The biggest difference between breaking and other types of dancing in the Olympics is that the dancers will have to improvise their moves to the songs played by the DJ.
The top ranked American dancer is Jeffery Louis. The highest ranked breakdancer is Shigeyuki Nakarai of Japan.
One sport that has been long awaited to be an Olympic sport is American football. Although it will only be flag football, it will captivate the American audience.
Most see this as an easy gold medal for team USA, but at the 2022 World Games, the US womens flag football team lost in the championship to team Mexico 39-6.
Another sport that has been growing in popularity recently is lacrosse. This too, however, will not be a full version of the game. Olympic lacrosse will be a six on six format, eliminating the use of long poles.
The addition of lacrosse sparks the need for a Haudenosaunee team at the Olympics. This is because the Native American nation Haudenosaunee invented the sport of lacrosse, before Europeans even landed in America.
Haudenosaunee does compete as part of World Lacrosse, achieving a bronze medal in the 2023 World Lacrosse Mens Championship. Team USA won the gold medal in the same tournament.
Cricket is a sport that is not often played in the United States; however, it is very popular in the UK and other countries that were occupied by the UK, including New Zealand, India and Australia.
Like soccer, cricket has a World Cup, and that is why it has taken so long for it to become an Olympic sport. The International Cricket Council was hesitant at first, but is now excited to create a competitor to its World Cup.
A less popular sport that is being added is squash. Squash is played on a court with rackets, like tennis.
The major difference between squash and tennis is that the players in squash bounce the ball off of a wall rather than hitting it directly over the net.
The best American squash player is Todd Harrity. Harrity is ranked at 41 in the world, this means that it will be tough for the US to get a gold in this event.
The most likely to win gold is Diego Elias of Peru. This does not mean that Peru is locked in for the gold, because five out of the top 10 squash players are from Egypt.
There is still a lot of time for these rankings to change, as all of these sports will have other tournaments before the 2028 Olympics. The opening ceremony will be Friday, July 14, 2028. While the Paris Games will begin on Friday, July 26, 2024.
