Cricket at the Olympics

2020 Olympic news: India missed the Cricket Bronze...lost to Poland by 1 run!!! Oh no, we don’t want this news instead we want to hear ‘India won the Gold Medal by defeating the World champion Australia’.

Well for this to happen, Cricket should definitely get an entry to Olympics. It’s a shame that cricket is still not part of the big event even after the introduction of T20 format. The Olympics are the world's greatest sporting spectacle and why shouldn't cricketers not be a part of it? Thanks to T20 format which gave us an option to be considered for Olympics considering the time factor. There are some events were each country dominate and the other countries try to adapt and follow them. Jamaicans dominate the short run, Ethiopia and Kenya dominate the long runs, and the list continues. Considering this why can’t a country like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka dominate this sport and eye for a medal for their country. Nowadays winning a medal in Olympics for the above mentioned countries is a nightmare and a struggle. Cricket is any time better than European handball and America’s favorite past time event baseball!! . Cricket is no more a game played only by 10 or 12 countries. The game is now already played in diverse countries with very different cultures.

T20 version of the game is always exciting, nail biting and fun to watch comparing to other sports like Trampoline, Modern Pentathlon and Sailing in Olympics. The recent IPL tournament had proved this. All the matches played in IPL were exciting; we never knew which team will win the match until the end. That’s the beauty of this format. One good over with the bat or ball can change the course of the game

The IOC should not bother about non-cricket playing countries like US and China for cricket in Olympics? Instead the ICC can groom the existing start up countries like Namibia, Kenya, Canada, Netherlands, Israel, Afghanistan, Argentina and Germany who started to play cricket at present. Cricket will not expand into the United States and China, until 2020. In spite of hosting a Football World Cup in 1994, the world's most popular sport remains a marginal presence in the American sporting consciousness. How can cricket even begin to enter this market when there is a perfect bat-and-ball alternative by means of Baseball? China has never competed in a men's Olympic Hockey tournament and the USA.. no one ever questions if Olympic participation is bad for Hockey! Cricket needs to be an Olympic event.

An Olympic gold should be as good as winning the World Cup! The reaction from Kapil Dev stated that Abhinav Bindra’s Gold medal is better than India’s 1983 Cricket World cup victory. The entire nation was happy and proud about Bindra’s achievement. Hat’s off to him on this achievement. Leander peas after losing two consecutive bronze medal double matches, one in 2004 and the other in 2008 had given a statement that he will again eye for the London-2012 Olympics Gold. No one is better than Leander when it comes to playing for the nation. His Davis cup statistics will answer his commitment. He holds the highest win-loss record for India having won 83 Davis Cup matches against 31 losses. He is the first to win an individual medal for India by winning a Bronze medal in 1996 Olympics Singles event. That’s the passion he has for the nation and for the game and especially for Olympics. That’s the supremacy and honor of an Olympic medal

To know the power of Olympics Gold, let’s take the current incident which happened in this Olympics; British athlete Rebecca Romero won the Rowing Silver medal in Athens-2004. She was desperate to win Gold and eventually she did that in Beijing 2008. You can wonder what the big deal in this is. But you will wonder if she had done it in other sporting event. Yes, she won Gold in Cycling in this Olympics. Such a inspiring story that she won the Cycling event four years after taking a rowing silver medal in Athens. So introducing Cricket in Olympics will definitely influence other countries and other sportsmen and down the line we can see a Chinese drive in the Cricket field

ICC should take this approach to expand further. We have around 12 years of time and that’s a pretty long period. They should allow the likes of ICL/IPL/EPL/XXL franchise to feature only the start up countries. Remember only with the start up countries. ICC has already had enough tournaments for the start up countries but it never got an exposure or publicity. ICL/IPL/EPL/XXL has that power and eventually they will succeed. At first Twenty20 cricket should be in the Commonwealth Games and from there they should take it to Olympics.

I wish one day I could see Arjun Tendulkar (son of Sachin Tendulkar) to hit a Six in the last ball to win a 2020 Olympic gold medal for India. Let’s hope this happens and let’s hope that Cricket gets an entry into Olympics sooner or later.