A few weeks ago, the International Olympic Committee confirmed the addition of five disciplines - some without precedents and others pre-existing - to the sports program of the Olympic Games in Los Angeles, in 2028: flag football, cricket, squash, lacrosse and baseball/softball.
Just as with karate in Tokyo 2020, which was incorporated in Japan and will no longer be in France, it seems that, in some cases, there is a new logic in evaluating what activities occasionally add up in one game and lose continuity in the next. If we consider that Brisbane will come after Los Angeles, it would not be surprising if flag football or lacrosse suffer the same instability as karate. What has a certain regional logic is still a significant detriment to activities that, like 95 percent of those participating in the Olympic program, have their highest competitive aspiration in the games.
A few days ago, just hours after the closing of the Pan American Games in Santiago, the unconfirmed version, supported by several important sources, began to circulate, that sports such as ball, racquetball and water skiing will not be part of the competitions scheduled for four years from now, in Barranquilla, Colombia.
The first thing that is visible, as in the aforementioned case of Olympic sports that are discontinued indiscriminately, is the enormous damage caused to activities that, if we look at it in the form of a national multi-sport call, lose much of their appeal. As in the case of the indefinite sanction of Russian sports, at least in terms of the enthusiasm of participating in a game, how much incentive do these disciplines lose? There are countless cases in which an Olympic event generated a boom in the development of sports that became of mass interest among the youngest and that, until a short time before, seemed reduced to a much more select nucleus. In other words, the phenomenon of successful mass media coverage encourages more girls and boys to approach unpopular disciplines.
On the other hand, going up and down from competition programs to certain sports, depending on the interests of the organizing country, opens up an infinite number of windows of objection.
For example, what would happen to rugby 7 or sailing if the Pan American Games of 2031 were held in Bolivia, where these sports have little roots? Should there be ornamental jumps if eight years from now the games were held in Argentina whose last Olympic representative in the specialty was Svetlana Ishkova, of Russian origin, who participated in a 3-meter trampoline in Sydney 2000? Although it is an activity that re-emerges hand in hand with a handful of young people, it is no coincidence that this country did not have representatives in that specialty in Santiago either.
Before each game, the country of which the host city is part has the right to include both teams and individual athletes in all sports without going through elimination stages. There were exceptions marked by the common sense of the host authorities. This was the case of Brazil, which on the way to Rio 2016 required its field hockey teams to figure at least fifth in the Pan American Games in Toronto 2015 to win the Olympic place. The boys did it. The women declined the invitation.
It is clear that it is unnatural and even expensive to set up all the infrastructure for a local organization that has zero development in certain sports. All that remains is to organize priorities a little more and defend sports and athletes more firmly.
Because if we were left with only what interests us or gives us important results, or we should eliminate half of the applications. Or eliminate half of the disciplines.
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