OlympicCricket2012's Blog

1. be on American TV which , like it or not,has a global reach and influence or
2. be in the Olympics - the biggest and most spectaular world stage in any field of endeavour.
Cricket is not on American TV, and it is not played in the Olympics.
 

Recently there has been some talk about cricket and the Olympics, partly because http://Cricket2012Games.com  started an online petiition to get cricket in the 2012 Olympics. All the haters and naysayers took the chance to speak up and roll out the same tired reasons for never changing, never adapting and never growing. The cricket world has no choice, it must adapt and it must seek to be a part of the Olympics as soon as possible. Not just for expansion but for sheer survival.

 

Already Australia, traditional cricket powerhouse, sends basketball, baseball and softball Teams to the Olympics. How come Australia plays baseball, or softball, 2 sports many think are limited to the USA ? That's evidence of how much inroads those 2 sports have made into “cricket territory”. By the year 2020 Australian men won’t necessarily be playing cricket, it could be baseball or basketball or rugby. The women might be playing softball, not cricket.

Or take the British, for the next 4 years leading up to the 2012 Olympics in London, they will be focusing their resources on Olympic Sports. Multi-millions of dollars are being spent on developing athletes to compete for Medals in Olympic Sports.The BBC will devote 3 out of their 4 channels to covering Olympic Sports.The next 4 years will see most British young athletes taking up Olympic sports, not cricket. Cricket grounds are already being taken over for other uses.

In the West Indies cricket is declining whilst basketball is growing   - fastest man in the world Usain Bolt could have probably been the fastest bowler in the world but switched from cricket to track . Countries that are geographically close to the West Indies such as the Dominican Republic send baseball stars to the USA instead of cricket stars to the cricket world. 
Cubans play baseball despite Castro's hatred of the USA but no Caribbean country ever made the attempt to use their past ties to Castro to spread cricket there. Caribbean countries sent people to study in Cuba but no cricketers. There are no Greek Orthodox people in Cuba, only Catholics, yet Castro built an enormous Greek Orthodox Church because he was mad with the Pope. Why has there been no attempt to include a Team from Florida in the West Indies cricket season ?

Recently some cricket greats like Steve Waugh and Ricky Ponting spoke of their desire to see cricket in the Olympics, which is great but unrealistically Waugh thinks we can wait until the year 2020 .There are so many other sports that will be ahead of cricket by then that it will have no chance. Besides why should cricket wait, this year  "sport" called BMX was included in the Olympics, and there was Volleyball and "Beach Volleyball". I could go on but it's not my desire to put down any sport, only to promote cricket.

The Chinese
Now the ICC is hoping to get the Chinese playing cricket - but let's ask what would be the Chinese's motivation to do so ? The Chinese won their first Olympic Gold Medal of any type in 1984 and 24 years later won the most Medals at the Olympics . Get cricket in the Olympics and they will start to play it, and try to win a Medal in it. So will the Russians, and the Germans.The Chinese will spend their own money to promote cricket if the payoff could be an Olympic Medal. 

Australia let us down in 2000 and Britain in 2012.

Sure there was no Twenty20 format in 2000 but as there were the 40 overs and 50 overs version, it was a nobrainer to think of an even shorter form such as 20/20. In fact I remember being disappointed in the 1990’s at Australia hosting the Games without cricket. I then calculated that about 20 overs would be suitable to make the game short enough - don’t tell me I’m such a genius that no one else could think of that.

How is it possible that London could win the bid to host the 2012 Olympics but cricket is not a part of the Games in the land of its birth ? How could England betray her own great history, her

Commonwealth family, her cricket legacy,and the billions of people who love this game England gave the world ?  Wherever the fault lies - this is a shame, this has to be one of the biggest blunders in sports history, and the effect goes way beyond sports. 

India irrelevant ?

Cricket's exclusion also means one billion people in India whose passion is cricket continue to be irrelevant on the world stage of the Olympics.
Is the cricketing world going to wake up and insist this egregious error be corrected for the 2012 Olympics ? At a minimum will we press for cricket to be an "exhibition" sport by the Host country ? or will we do nothing, then in 2012 whilst the world is celebrating athletes like Michael Phelps cricketers will sit meekly in their corners, left out of the Games again. 

Taken from http://Cricket2012Games.com

 

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