Five sports that were absent from the Paris 2024 Olympic programme are scheduled for the Los Angeles 2028 Games: cricket, flag football, lacrosse, squash, and baseball with softball. The International Olympic Committee approved the additions at its October 2023 session. For British federations, the change matters most in cricket, lacrosse and squash, where Great Britain has an established domestic game but no Olympic route to a medal.
What the programme now includes
Cricket returns to the Olympics for the first time since 1900, when the Devon and Somerset Wanderers club beat a French side in Paris. The LA28 tournament is planned in the Twenty20 format, the short version of the game that finishes in about three hours. Flag football is a non-contact variant of American football, and baseball and softball come back together after both were dropped following Tokyo 2020.
Final venue allocations and the full competition schedule for each sport are still being confirmed by the organising committee. Anyone quoting a medal-event count or a venue list should check the latest LA28 release, because those details have changed between announcements.
Why the UK governing bodies are paying attention
The England and Wales Cricket Board would select any British cricket team, and the Olympic slot gives the sport an international showcase that its domestic competitions do not provide. The Hundred, the ECB's own city-based tournament, runs in August and is not tied to any Games calendar, so the Olympics would be a separate platform rather than an extension of it.
British Lacrosse operates on a much smaller budget than the ECB. An Olympic place would open funding conversations that are hard to have without a medal pathway, although UK Sport allocates Olympic money on evidence of medal prospects. That means the sport will have to show competitive progress, not just popularity, before the money follows.
England Squash already has an international tour, a world ranking system and a professional calendar. Its problem is visibility beyond the sport's own audience. Olympic inclusion would put squash in front of broadcasters and sponsors who do not currently watch it, and that changes how the sport is priced for media deals.
What happens next
Qualification pathways are being set by the international federations for each sport, and their timing will decide how much preparation time national teams get. Governing bodies in the UK have not yet announced dedicated Olympic programmes for the new sports. Any such announcement is likely to follow confirmation of how many athletes each federation can enter, a figure the international bodies have not finalised.