Cricket in the Olympics: The REAL reason for a long-awaited second innings

Cricket in the Olympics: The REAL reason for a long-awaited second innings

Rich Clarke
Governing Bodies

Every four years, without fail, I take up an interest in a new sport.

Despite never being the most demonstrable of fans, I pace the room as the curling goes to the last end. Or chukka. Or whatever the hell they call it. Likewise, canoe slalom gets me going when a guy I never previously heard of fails to duck under that dangling pole when paddling upstream and, for a while, even dressage ceases to be dancing for horses but a discipline of national importance.

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At the 2012 Olympics, I dropped a good few hundred quid on taking the family to Windsor for the heats of the rowing sprints. To be honest, the sport was pretty dull but they were the only tickets I could get. Yet, as an event it lives on in the memory. You felt a part of something and I wanted the kids to be able to say they went to the London games.

The power of this five-ringed circus should not be underestimated. For most of the population, 80s sporting figures such as Torvill and Dean, Daley Thompson and Sebastian Coe only emerged from hibernation every four summers, but their golden successes afforded them a public profile that lasts until this day. The likes of Tom Daley and Adam Peaty are in the same position now, albeit they have the rocket fuel of reality television and social media to maintain their recognition.

Given this power and cricket’s struggle for relevance in the past few decades, it is staggering that it has taken so long for the sport to be welcomed back into the Olympic fold. But it is now fully expected after the game’s inclusion was recommended by the LA28 organising committee on October 9.

The reasons, as ever, are money, power and control.

WG Grace was in the final few years of his playing career when cricket was last played at the Olympics. And, even then, many of the participants did not know their fixture was part of the Games

The Games have been publicly inviting a return for more than a decade. But now the timing and potential rewards would seem perfect. By the time LA 2028 begins, Major League Cricket will have had five years to build on its well-received launch. If all goes well, the investment dollars will still be pouring in.

After that, we have Brisbane 2032, where a home gold would enjoy national adulation and historical significance.

But the real prize is in 2036 if Ahmedabad takes the Olympics to India for the first time. The country’s television broadcaster is playing £15.6m for the rights to show Paris 2024. It has been estimated that this would increase 10-fold if cricket was included in a Games held in India.

Meanwhile, the country is showing improvement in track and field, taking a record 28 competitors to the recent World Athletics Championships in Budapest with Neeraj Chopra scooping a gold in the javelin to go with his success at the last Olympics in Tokyo.

That was only their 10th win at a summer Games, their second outside of field hockey and one of a couple since Moscow in 1980. The Olympics is treated with a certain indifference compared to the passion of the British and the movement is eager to grow its global resonance. A sport treated with quasi-religious fervour in the world’s most populous and fast-developing country would seem a prime target.

But it would mean the BCCI working with or, whisper it quietly, under the India Olympic Committee and government.

Of course, Olympic status would be a huge boost to Associate sides, who could gain national funding, access to greater facilities and sponsorship opportunities given the spotlight the Games shines on every sport.

You would have thought that alone would have been enough to push for inclusion decades ago. Like cricket, tennis was a global sport before being brought into the Olympic fold but now a gold medal is akin to winning the fifth major.

But Giles Clarke, ECB chair from 2007 to 2015, pushed back suggesting the loss of two to three weeks in August could cost them millions in lost Test revenue. How times have changed? This year the Ashes was set aside for The Hundred. Of course, the Olympics would be playing T20, thus confirming that format, not the 16.4 over version, as the world's short-form game.

The London games demonstrated one of the peculiarities of Team GB with a men’s football team half-heartedly cobbled together to accommodate England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland then limping out on penalties to South Korea in the last eight. British cricket would surely sort this out given a podium place would be expected. Meanwhile, the West Indies would go the other way, splintering into island nations.

At London, Team GB’s women got no further. However, unlike their male counterparts, the competition was best v best. One of the arguments pitched against cricket’s Olympic inclusion in the past has been a lack of quality on the female side. That is long gone and seemed pretty misogynistic anyway. The boost to the women’s game would be huge. It certainly benefitted from inclusion at the Commonwealth Games at Birmingham

And then, after all that, you must consider the number of teams, the qualification criteria, the pitches, the schedule and everything else.

That part was easy in 1900, the only other time cricket featured at the Olympics. Belgium and the Netherlands pulled out, leaving Great Britain, represented by Devon and Somerset Wanderers, who were touring France at the time, taking on the home nation, represented mostly by ex-pats, for the gold medal. Chasing 185 to win, the hosts were bowled out for 26.

Neither side knew they were playing in an Olympic event as the games were spread out across France over many months and there was little formal organisation. Their medals were only recognised in 1912.

By the 1904 games in St Louis, cricket had already been forgotten as an Olympic sport.

The REAL value is sport is immeasurable

The REAL value is sport is immeasurable
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