Quote:
Originally Posted by Elephant Walk
While I agree...as a purely spectator sport however (such as baseball), sports like swimming, badminton, marathons, running, etc are not well attended whatsoever nor extremely popular. Popularity should not be the definition of what is let into the olympics and what is not.
|
Yes, I agree with you as well. There's popularity of participation in a sport and then popularity of spectating that sport.
Marathons & the Olympics are not much of an issue - you basically buy a ticket to a day or period of athletic events and get to see the marathon along with it, as far as I understand. But yeah, very few people sit around and watch marathons on TV or anything, though people do turn out to watch them go through their city.
Swimming is a pretty popular sport in terms of international participation - the number of countries fielding swimmers attests to that. Not a typical spectator sport outside the Olympics, but the tickets do sell well.
To get into the Olympics, a sport has to meet certain requirements - mainly, it has to have an international governing federation and it has to be practiced in a variety of countries (that's the sense in which popularity matters to the IOC, although of course they're also interested in sports that will sell tickets (although kind of a moot point in some ways, because a lot of people just want a ticket, any ticket) and sports that will play well to the US TV audience).
The easiest way to get a sport into the Olympics at this point is to add a different category of events into an already recognized sport. So for example, FIG is the governing body of gymnastics, and it governs "regular" artistic gymnastics as well as rhythmic gymnastics and trampolining. So it was easier to get rhythmic gymnastics and trampolining added because they were already part of a recognized sport and TECHNICALLY not new Olympic sports, just new events.
By the way, here is the current list of IOC-recognized sports that are not approved to have events at the Olympics. Any of these would be more likely to become an event at the Olympics than a non-recognized sport:
* Air sports
* Bandy
* Billiard sports
* Boules
* Bowling
* Bridge
* Chess
* Climbing
* Cricket
* DanceSport (basically ballroom dancing)
* Golf
* Karate
* Korfball
* Lifesaving
* Motorcycle sport
* Netball
* Orienteering
* Pelote Basque
* Polo
* Powerboating
* Racquetball
* Roller sports
* Rugby
* Squash
* Sumo
* Surfing
* Tug of war
* Underwater sports
* Water skiing
* Wushu
In December 2007, the IOC rejected replacing baseball and softball with karate and squash - which was viewed as a moral victory for baseball and softball possibly coming back.
Oh yeah, and powerboating was also an Olympic sport at one time.