Nearly 50 summer sports — including long-discontinued ones like motorboating and tug-of-war — have made appearances at the Olympic Games since its start in 1896.
This year, athletes are competing across 32 sports and 329 events at the Paris Olympics. That’s more than three times the number of sports featured at the very first modern Games held in Athens 128 years ago, according to a CNN analysis of Olympic Studies Centre data.
Breaking, or elite breakdancing, is the newest addition to the summer lineup. The sport was proposed by the Paris 2024 Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games along with skateboarding, sport climbing and surfing — which made their debuts at the last summer Olympics in Tokyo — in an effort to attract a new, younger audience.
Only five sports — aquatics, athletics, cycling, fencing and gymnastics — have appeared in each of the 30 iterations of the Olympic Games. Others, such as croquet and karate, have had much shorter Olympic runs and were discontinued immediately after debut.
Sports that have made strong comebacks over the years include archery, golf, rugby and tennis. These four were introduced in the early years of the Games, then were left out for more than five decades before being reintroduced. All four have made the 2024 program.
How new sports get added to the Olympic Games
The process of adding a sport to the Olympic program is a complicated one that comes with a long list of criteria and continues to undergo changes. After proving that it meets myriad eligibility and compliance requirements, a sport can be considered for and added to the Olympics program the traditional way — by being added to the Initial Sports Program by the International Olympic Committee — or the new way — by proposal of the host country.
Long gone are the days when countries fought over where the Games would be hosted next. In recent decades, hosting the Olympics has become a massive economic burden costing cities billions or tens of billions of dollars. Host countries, as a result, now have more leverage than ever in adding to the Olympic program.
“Twenty years ago this process was far more ironclad,” said Taylor McKee, assistant professor of sports management at Brock University in Ontario, Canada. “Now it’s like, ‘Look, if they want breaking, we’ll find a way. They want cricket, we’ll find a way.’”
In 2014, the IOC adopted a set of recommendations called the “Olympic Agenda 2020,” which opened the door for the OCOG of a host country to recommend sports to include in their edition of the Games. The 2020 Tokyo OCOG was the first committee to take advantage of this route and successfully added five new sports to the lineup that year: baseball/softball, karate, skateboarding, sports climbing and surfing.
Criteria for deciding whether a sport should be added or rejected is extensive and wide-ranging. Some are straight forward — like the quota of athletes and officials — but others, not so much.
“It’s not an easy process to understand. And that’s kind of the point,” said McKee.
Additions to the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles are already being finalized. The LA 2028 OCOG proposed five new sports for the Olympic program that were approved by the IOC in late 2023. The next edition of the summer Games will feature flag football and squash for the first time in Olympic history. It will also bring back baseball/softball, cricket and lacrosse — which was dropped from the Olympic program following a brief two-year stint in the early 1900s.
