Basketball Hall of Famer and Dodgers co-owner Magic Johnson discusses the potential impact of baseball’s inclusion in the Olympics on its popularity.
Do you ever wonder how long breaking will remain an Olympic sport? Do you find yourself asking what happened to the Olympic tug-of-war event?
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has been making important decisions on which sports will be included in the Olympic Games and which will be left out since the first modern Olympic Games in 1896.
Events are added, discontinued and sometimes reintroduced based on their international popularity.
Here are some sports from the 2020 Tokyo Olympics that have been dropped and will not be featured at the 2024 Olympics in Paris.
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Baseball
Though baseball was first featured in the Olympic Games of 1904 and later turned into a medal event for the 1992 Olympics Games in Barcelona, America’s pastime has seen one too many a curve ball when it comes to consistently being featured in the Olympics.
While doping was a deleterious concern in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the primary and longstanding issue behind baseball’s tenuous relationship with the Olympic Games lies within scheduling. Considering the totality of a 162-game Major League Baseball season, the summer is a critical period for professional baseball, leading to significant conflicts for players wanting to play for their countries in the Games.
Softball
Having been played in the Olympic Games from 1996 to 2008, softball vanished from the programs for the following two Games (2012, 2016) before making its way back onto the summer stage in 2020.
Baseball and softball will both return for the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles.
Karate
Despite making its successful debut at the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo — featuring 80 competitors, allocated between two male and two female divisions (“kata” and “kumite”) — karate got the chop for the Paris Games.
The IOC’s decision to remove the combat sport that originated in Okinawa in the 17th century caught many in the martial arts community off guard, especially given the sport’s popularity in France.
According to Reuters, karate was rejected from past Olympic bids because organizers said “the sport lacked entertainment value and the ability to attract a younger audience.” The latter sentiment is hard to argue against, as the “kata” division, where athletes execute a series of “fixed defensive and offensive moves against a virtual opponent,” skewed older with an average age of 30 at the Tokyo Games.
