Cricket to be an Olympic sport?

The International Cricket Council ICC said after a meeting with the International Olympic Committee on Sunday that it will explore ways to remove hurdles for the sport's inclusion at the Summer Games.

Reuters / Carl Recine

The sport's shortest format Twenty20 cricket has already been a part of the last two editions of Asian Games in Guangzhou (China 2010) and Incheon (South Korea 2014).

But efforts to be included in the Olympic programme are far from being finalised.

The chief executive of the ICC David Richardson and general manager cricket Geoff Allardice recently met IOC chief Thomas Bach in Lausanne, Switzerland to discuss cricket's inclusion at the Summer Olympics.

In the past, not many attempts were undertaken to lobby for Cricket to become an Olympic sport. Critics say that the the chosen format for Olympic inclusion would have to be the short and disposable Twenty20.

The truly “Olympian” version of the game, they say, Test cricket, would be too long and incomprensible to a global audience.

On top of that, the cricket calendar is too crowded for the players to treat the trip with anything like the importance it would deserve.

In the past, only one cricket tournament was played as part of the Olympic Games: the match that took place on 19–20 August at the Vélodrome de Vincennes as part of the 1900 Summer Olympics.

The only match of the tournament was played between teams representing Great Britain and France, and was won by 158 runs by Great Britain.