How a Sport Gets Into the Olympics — and Why It Keeps Getting Dropped

Two routes, and only one is permanent

This is the distinction that makes everything else make sense, and it is almost never drawn clearly.

One category of event grows without costing quota — see mixed-gender Olympic events.

What the Games pay the athletes in them is a newer argument — see Olympic prize money.

A sport can also lose its place by losing its federation — see how Olympic boxing had to build a new one.

The core programme is set by the IOC and carries from Games to Games. Athletics, swimming, gymnastics and the rest are simply there.

Additional sports are something else entirely. The host city’s organising committee may propose a package of extra sports for its own edition of the Games only. It is an option, not an obligation, and it confers nothing beyond that single Olympics.

A sport that arrives by the second route has not “become an Olympic sport”. It has been invited to one Games.

The approval chain

Step	Who
1. Proposal	Host city organising committee
2. Review	IOC Olympic Programme Commission (OPC)
3. Put forward	IOC Executive Board (EB)
4. Approval	IOC Session — the vote that decides

Note where the initiative sits. The IOC does not go looking for sports to add; the host asks. A sport’s federation must therefore persuade an organising committee in a particular country, in a particular cycle, that including it serves that city’s Games.

That is a very different lobbying problem from persuading a governing body on merit, and it explains why the same sport can be welcome in one country and ignored in the next.

The criteria are about the host, not just the sport

Modern pentathlon read those criteria and removed its founding discipline, dropping riding for an obstacle course from 2028 — see modern pentathlon rules.

The evaluation criteria come from Olympic Agenda 2020+5, and reading them shows what the IOC is actually optimising for:

• cost and complexity of hosting
• participation of the best athletes
• athlete health and safety
• global appeal to fans
• host country interest
• gender equality
• youth relevance

Only two of those are about the sport in isolation. The rest are about what the sport costs the host and what it does for the audience. “Host country interest” is doing especially heavy lifting — it is an explicit invitation to pick sports that are popular where the Games are being held.

Which is why the programme keeps changing

The consequences are visible across three consecutive Olympics.

Games	Notable additions
Tokyo 2020	karate, baseball/softball, and others
Paris 2024	breaking — karate and baseball/softball dropped
LA28	baseball/softball, flag football, cricket (T20), lacrosse (sixes), squash — breaking dropped

Karate debuted at Tokyo after decades of campaigning by its federation, and was not chosen by Paris or Los Angeles. Breaking debuted at Paris and was not chosen by Los Angeles. Neither was “removed” in any meaningful sense, because neither was ever permanently added.

And look at LA28’s package with “host country interest” in mind: flag football, baseball, lacrosse and cricket. Three are among the most-played sports in the United States; the fourth opens an enormous South Asian audience. The package is coherent the moment you stop reading it as a judgement on the sports and start reading it as a judgement by a host.

What this means for a federation

Lacrosse is the clearest worked example: it returns at LA28 in a purpose-built compressed format — see lacrosse sixes.

A sport chasing the Olympics is not seeking a permanent status that no longer exists in that form. It is running a campaign per Games, against criteria weighted toward the host’s own interests, with a vote at the end that can go the other way next cycle.

That is a harsher institutional reality than the usual framing of “becoming an Olympic sport”, and it explains behaviour that otherwise looks strange — federations restructuring their formats to be cheaper and shorter, adopting smaller-sided versions like lacrosse sixes and T20 cricket specifically to fit a Games.

The formats are being designed for the criteria. That is what the criteria were meant to do.

The older pattern this replaces

The Games have always edited themselves — the ancient Olympics ran a programme that changed over centuries, and the modern revival has added and dropped sports since 1896.

What Agenda 2020 changed is where the power sits. Previously the programme was the IOC’s to set. Now a meaningful part of it is delegated, one Games at a time, to whoever is hosting — which makes the Olympic programme less a canon than a rolling negotiation.

More on the bodies that govern sport is in how sport is run, and on the Games themselves in the history of the Olympics.