This year’s Olympic games features 28 sports and a whole lot more disciplines on display at Rio De Janeiro from athletics to shooting to weightlifting, however there are a whole lot more sports that don’t feature that could become Olympic sports in the future; so how does a sport actually get to feature at the Games?

A lot of it depends on timing as the Olympics prefers a stick rather than twist approach the sport it offers, currently 25 Olympic sports are listed as core, these are your typical big events such as track & field, rowing and football and it takes a lot for a sport to be de-listed as core.

That being said it is by no means impossible to lose core status, wrestling which was once a staple of the Olympic diet will lose its core status after Rio due to a decline in the Greco-Roman discipline since Sydney 2000; meaning it had to apply to be included in Tokyo’s 2020 games.

The IOC has recently changed its system so now the 25 five core sports are then joined by three ‘floating’ sports, currently these are Rugby Sevens and Golf, with a slot technically open now but will be filled by wrestling after the end of this games.

The Criteria

To become an Olympic event a sport must first rubber stamping by the IOC that you are….well a sport! In order to do that you must fulfil a 40 point criteria set out by the Olympic governing body.

I won’t bore you with every little detail, but there are some key points such as is there a world championship? Is it already a sport in another major games such the Commonwealth games?

There are two crucial ones, however, does it have a sole international governing body and does it adhere to the world anti-doping program.

However, the criteria is much more stringent than you would think and a lot of sports that are not IOC recognised struggle to meet it. For instance, Darts fails on a count it has two recognised international governing bodies.

Once you become an IOC recognised sport, you do not lose that status even if you would fail the criteria now, for instance, boxing would fail for the same reason darts does if it applied now, however, because it already has IOC status is still recognised.

The votes

Once a sport becomes IOC recognised it can then apply to be part of the Olympic games, however, this process is also difficult, firstly a sport has to come out which only leaves three options for the IOC.

That sport is than joined by two shortlisted IOC sports that go to a vote with the winner becoming an Olympic sport, the last vote saw wrestling retain its Olympic status ahead of squash and Baseball/softball.

The only other way a sport can be in the Olympics and have medals awarded is for the hosts to propose its inclusion, the first test of this will be the 2020 games in Tokyo were skateboarding, karate, surfing, sports climbing will all feature, as well as the return of baseball and softball.

These sports, however, are all still ‘Olympic’ sports recognised by the IOC and any sport a host wants to add has to be approved by the IOC (which often means be recognised); a country doesn’t get to choose any sport just because it’s the hosts.

It does open up some potential oddball sports still recognised by the IOC to crop up at the games, anyone up for watching a spot of Olympic bridge, chess or billiards?

Failing that, a sport used to be able to be at the Olympics as a demonstration sport where it’s athletes still get Olympic medals, but they do not count towards the official medal table, this stopped after 1992 as the IOC started to worry that the Olympics were becoming too big.

They still technically exist, however, are now seen as parallel competitions rather than demonstration sports, for instance the 2016 eGames for eSports is being held in Rio at the same time as the Olympics with winners receiving medals; for all intents and purposes it is a demonstration sport, however, the only difference being that Olympic medals are not awarded.