By Daniel Brettig
Since its fleeting appearance at the 1900 Games, cricket’s only subsequent visit to the Olympics was via the pastiche of Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony at London 2012.
With Twenty20 to formally enter the Olympics after the International Cricket Council put in a bid for inclusion in August 2021, it will be a case of an inveterate contrarian finally accepting an invitation from world sport’s most prestigious club after years of spurning its entreaties.
Cricket featured at the London 2012 Olympics opening ceremony, but the sport has not officially been played at the Games since 1900.Credit: Iain McGregor
An incredible layer to a saga that should end in Los Angeles in 2028, ahead of the Brisbane Olympics four years later, is how it was never the IOC that held significant reservations about cricket.
Instead, holdouts from India and England served to stall cricket’s chance at a truly worldwide audience. All for the kinds of self-interested reasons that have characterised too many of the game’s decisions since the south Asian market was opened up by satellite television around the time of the 1996 World Cup.
To the immense frustration of many emerging nations, but also Cricket Australia, several pushes for Olympic inclusion were rebuffed, despite their backing at the highest levels of the IOC. “We would welcome an application. It’s an important, popular sport and very powerful on television,” IOC president Jacques Rogge had said in 2011.
Under the leadership of former chairman Giles Clarke, the England and Wales Cricket Board filibustered multiple attempts for Olympic entry by claiming that the loss of two weeks for the Games would do irreparable harm to its home summer.
“It’s a tournament too far. We don’t have the space in our calendar,” Clarke said in the 2015 documentary, Death of a Gentleman. “The Olympics takes place during the English season. It’s impossible for us to set aside time for it. It would have an enormous economic impact on the game in this country. It’s a complete non-starter. We’re not going to be playing Olympic cricket for men.”
According to a 2014 strategic report by the ICC, “the ECB has estimated that an Olympic Games in the first half of August could see it lose an entire four-match Test series which would, based on its current valuations, cause cricket in England and Wales to miss out on revenues of $US130 million and would – based on the knock-on effects in other years – require compensation of approximately $US160 million.”
Given this year’s Ashes series was shoehorned entirely into July to clear August for the Hundred, that argument no longer applies.
At the same time, the Board of Control for Cricket in India had baulked at the possibility of being under the jurisdiction of Indian Olympic authorities and by extension, their government. The BCCI’s self-regard was illustrated by how it preferred to be a benefactor for Olympic sports rather than the other way around.
In 2008, the BCCI had actually done a deal with the nation’s sports ministry to provide philanthropic help for archery, boxing, judo, swimming and weightlifting, to ensure their growth during the Olympics and Commonwealth Games. Cricket itself, though, was not to be shared with the world.
That had been the year when CA’s chief executive James Sutherland commissioned a report on Olympic inclusion. It was authored by Philip Pope, a former CA public affairs manager who had led the PR for London’s successful 2012 Olympic bid, and presented to the ICC by Sutherland and CA’s then chair Creagh O’Connor.
Pope made the clear case for inclusion on the basis that there would be mutual benefits for cricket and the Olympic movement. The IOC had long puzzled over how to engage more of the south Asian population of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, while also initiating rigorous reviews of which sports were included in the Games.
“The Olympic family recognise the future economic importance of the Asian subcontinent and are beginning to realise they may have to find a vehicle to give the Olympic brand more traction in that part of the world,” the report said. “There is a view that come 2020, 2024 or 2028 the Olympic brand cannot continue to be a stranger to the population of that region, especially their young people or their fast-growing economies.”
Equally, the stamp of Olympic credibility would not only broaden cricket’s audience, but also tap into public and corporate funding shared with the sports that appeared at the summer Games every four years. By the report’s estimation, that could mean up to $US50 million extra funding over four years in some countries.
Those dollars, to be directed toward national cricket programs, would be eagerly sought not only by countries struggling to break into the closed shop of cricket’s “full members”. They would also offer some help to the likes of South Africa, where the overnight retirement of Quinton De Kock so he can play in the Big Bash League underlined how Twenty20 franchise leagues are cannibalising international cricket.
These leagues are growing at a rate that threatens one of the sport’s main selling points to the Olympics – the guaranteed appearances of top players. This is one of many reasons why Olympics inclusion has arrived far later than it should have.
Indian cricket, of course, scarcely needs more money. But in an era of increasingly brazen crossover between the BCCI, the Bharatiya Janata political party, and India’s all-powerful Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the notion of government oversight or interference in cricket is now seen to be more like a benefit than a risk.
T20 and the Indian Premier League are key to cricket’s Olympic appeal.Credit: AP
And in terms of long games, the IOC and cricket each have a shared goal to strive for. Just as the IOC once played out the engagement of China over a couple of decades and multiple cycles before Beijing first hosted the Olympics in 2008, a similar pattern is emerging with India.
After LA in 2028 and Brisbane in 2032, Ahmedabad is mounting a bid for the Games in 2036, doubtless to centre on the cavernous Narendra Modi Stadium that will host this year’s ODI World Cup final. The Olympics hosted by India without cricket would be something like Athens 2004 without the athletics.
Should the cards fall cricket’s way in LA on Friday, it will likely be fully ensconced as an Olympic concern by that time. As such, men’s and women’s Twenty20 will reach into many more countries, and gain fresh audiences and revenue for the IOC. Better late than never.
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