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Follow UsIn the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games in London, many artists portrayed a game of cricket in the English countryside - reflecting the history of this British sport.
16 years later, in 2028, in Los Angeles (LA), United States of America, cricket would be seen yet again, but this time not by performing artists. It would be the international cricketing stars who would paint the American country in the sporting colours.
It took 128 years, but the wait will be worth it when the world’s biggest non-Olympics sport returns to the Olympics.
Cricket’s inclusion at the biggest sporting event on planet Earth has been a long time coming. Due to the lack of interest by powerful national cricket boards like the ECB (England and Wales Cricket Board) and the BCCI (The Board of Control for Cricket in India), the ICC (International Cricket Council) failed to coalesce a collective bid for Olympics inclusion.
It was a matter of great disappointment.
Despite having one of the biggest viewerships for any sport in the World, cricket failed to expand its global footprint due to the lack of administrative initiatives to expand the game.
But in 2021, right around the Tokyo Olympics, the ICC announced officially that it was going all guns blazing to have the sport at LA28. It formed a working group including the then ECB chair Ian Watmore, ICC’s Independent director (and a US-based business tycoon) Indra Nooyi, and Chair of USA cricket, Parag Marathe, amongst others.
A $3 million budget was allocated to prepare for the bidding process, which included a widespread public relations campaign.
Finally, at the International Olympic Committee (IOC) meeting in Mumbai, Cricket’s bid was approved, confirming its presence at the LA Olympics.
Cricket’s massive South Asian audience and the fan following of some of its biggest names were often quoted by the IOC officials as one of the major factors behind ICC’s successful bid. Niccolo Campriani, director of LA LOCOG (Local Organising Committee), said yesterday -
“Think [about] my friend here, Virat. He's the third-most followed athlete in the world on social media, with 314 million followers. That's more than LeBron James, Tom Brady and Tiger Woods combined. This is the ultimate win-win for LA 28.”
The IOC has been looking to increase its audience and finances. Between 2017-2021, 61% of its revenue came from broadcasting rights. With Cricket and more than a billion eyeballs added to its kitty, that percentage will surely burst through the roof, along with the Olympic movement’s access to newer athletes and fans.
The extra money that IOC is bound to earn will help the game's growth in more ways than one.
90% of the IOC revenue is spent on the Olympic Games, athlete development and the Olympic movement, which is further funnelled to help smaller sports associations grow. Between 2017-21, IOC earned 7.6 billion dollars in revenue. A decent amount from that will now be spent on the growth of cricket worldwide.
Campriani also mentioned it yesterday in Mumbai, claiming that the Olympics movement will allow the game to grow out of traditional cricket countries. The ICC, sadly, hasn’t been efficient in expanding cricket’s global footprints until now. With the IOC now being monetarily invested in the game's mushrooming, ICC also needs to pull up its pants.
Countries that are on the fringes of International cricket currently are going to benefit from this the most. Nations like Mongolia, whose men's and women’s teams played their first-ever international game in the T20 competition in the recently completed Hangzhou Asian Games, had to play with a limited number of kits in China. Even those kits were donated to them by the French Embassy.
Mongolia can now rely on steady funding from the IOC and ICC. With Cricket becoming an Olympic sport, their national government would also like to invest in building facilities for their team, which are frugal, to say the least.
Along with the emerging cricket teams, behemoths like the USA and China will now be incentivised to invest directly in blooming the game in their countries. In America, cricket is already a buzzword with the recent successful first edition of the Major League Cricket (MLC).
They will co-host the 2024 T20 World Cup along with the West Indies, and a new cricket stadium is also being built in New York. Cricket at LA28 will take the game to another level in the US.
Meanwhile, China, where Cricket is recognised as an official sport in the curriculum of 21 Universities, would also like to hasten the game's development there. China takes the Olympics more seriously than any other nation, with a great amount of government funding being channelled to develop athletes and infrastructure in all Olympic sports.
Now, Cricket will be one more such sport in the Olympic powerhouse.
The 20 million dollar cricket stadium in Hangzhou, which hosted the Asian Games, will hopefully be one of the many cricketing venues in the giant nation in the future.
Apart from the global expansion of the sports, the growth of women’s cricket will be another major plus point in Cricket’s inclusion in the Olympics, as teams would fight for a gold medal in both the men's and women’s games.
Cricket boards, which have neglected the development of women’s cricket programmes in their nation, will now be enticed to invest in it to receive extra funding. Moreover, nations like Rwanda and Brazil, where Women’s cricket is on the rise, will now get the extra impetus to develop their athletes who impressed many in the Women’s U19 World Cup in South Africa this year.
For far too long now, Cricket has restricted itself as a sport mostly played by commonwealth countries and South Asian expatriates. That is going to change with Cricket now being a part of LA28. A sport that is over three centuries old is finally on the precipice of global expansion. And as it does so, there’s only one goal that it should aim for - GOLD!
