Sports

When sporting hopes and dreams are squashed flat

The nations squash aficionados will no doubt be miffed to hear the news that their favourite racquet sport has been overlooked for the 2024 Paris Olympics in favour of break dancing.

Squash has missed out again.

Squash has missed out again.Credit:Sitthixay Ditthavong

I feel you, squash people. Squash is a fine game. I love the “thwuck” of racquet on little black ball, the “swock” of little black ball against wall and the “schwip” of sandshoe on court. I dont even mind the “thunk” when the ball hits the baseboard.

Its cool when you play it out of doors in those glass-walled courts, which presumably they would were it to feature in Paris (unless they wanted to move the squash competition to Templestowe: no Australian suburb built in the 1970s was complete without a squash academy).

But the Olympic Games is already a quadrennial festa of sports most people have never heard of, much less play or care about.

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The Olympic Games is already a quadrennial festa of sports most people have never heard of, much less play or care about.

Whole sections of the programme – track and field, swimming – would not exist if they werent part of the US college sports system and its accompanying Cold War with the unfree world. How many kids do you know who want to be 200-metre sprinters when they grow up? Probably not enough to fill an Auskick backline.

Another large tranche of Olympic “sports” are admittedly skillful and strenuous recreational activities whose outcome when practised in competition is determined by old men and women in colourful blazers watching from the safety of the sidelines: Im talking about everything from figure skating to freestyle snowboarding here. Break dancing will fit in with that lot perfectly.

About the only Olympic sport that enjoys grassroots participation and global interest is soccer (which the games international uberlords milk in a manner the IOC can only envy), and even that is played in a bowdlerised semi-underage format at the Olympics.

The problem, of course, is that the International Olympic Committee has to find ways to focus the worlds eyeballs on the worldRead More – Source

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