From the session of the International Olympic Committee scheduled for Sunday in Mumbai, important decisions will come regarding the possible participation of Russian and Belarusian athletes in next year’s Paris games, but there is also some curiosity around more frivolous topics, such as the choice of disciplines to be included or not in the 5-circle program for 2028, when the Olympics will be held for the third time in Los Angeles. It seems there are five sports waiting to know their fate. The first is baseball, which for women is transformed into softball: an American sport par excellence, an Olympic discipline since 1992, it needs no introduction and it is safe to bet that it will not struggle – after its absence in 2012 and 2016 – to confirm its presence after the good impression left in Tokyo.
The world leaders of cricket, a game invented by Flemish shepherds in the 14th century and present at the Games only in 1900 and with only two participating teams, have also postulated for the investiture. Extremely popular in a dozen Commonwealth countries, it is practically unknown in the rest of the world, where – not entirely wrongly – it is considered deadly boring. After all, each match lasts 4 or 5 days, and only since TV began to show a timid interest in the discipline was a restricted formula introduced so that matches can be concluded in a maximum of 4 hours. Despite everything, we imagine he can pass the exam, also because the decision will be made in India, a country that is crazy about cricket.
Another very ancient sport is lacrosse, a pastime of some original populations of North America which already fascinated the missionary Jean de Brebeuf in the seventeenth century: as well as pure competition – wrote the Jesuit – that game was also used to resolve conflicts within clans or between different tribes to avoid, where possible, facing each other with arrows and tomahawks, which are much more lethal. This discipline, which appears to be a mix of soccer, football and hockey, has two Olympic participations dating back over 100 years, and it is likely that it will be proposed again in 2028: Americans are in fact developing a certain sensitivity – at least formally – towards First Nation culture and lacrosse is undoubtedly the favorite hobby of the natives, so much so that it is the only sport in the world to have a national team made up only of ‘redskins’, the Iroquois, which regularly takes part in the most important international competitions along with the United States, Canada, Australia and England.
But the best news of all, if we want to have a healthy grin, concerns the possible introduction into the five-circle program of flag football, a much refined version of American football, a sport which is only vaguely inspired by it. A typical game for family picnics and physical education classes – situations in which it would be inappropriate to bruise grandparents, cousins and classmates – instead of tackling, it requires the opponent to snatch a small flag hanging from his belt. In short, football – a contact sport by definition – is deprived of its very nature.
Since every school plays with a thousand different rules, it is a very difficult discipline to codify and on television – just like squash, another sport waiting to know its fate in the five-ring world – it is not sexy at all. In my poor opinion, it would be like including Formula 1 in the Olympic program but – having the flaw of being very noisy and far too fast – then making a hole in the bottom of the single-seaters to make the drivers scamper around as if they were Fred and Barney from The Ancestors .
The only certain thing is that at the Californian Games in five years’ time we will not see competitions in sculpture, painting, music, literature and architecture, which were instead present in the program from 1912 to 1948: on the initiative of Baron de Coubertin – who wanted according to the ancient Greek tradition combine athletics and aesthetics – in fact even artists took part in the Olympics. Strictly amateurs, obviously.
2023-10-12 06:33:58
#Cricket #lacrosse #Iroquois #national #team
