Twenty20 cricket and the Ultramarathon deserve Olympic recognition

There are two events that should be added to the Olympic programme that would prove to be successful - Twenty20 Cricket and the Ultramarathon.

Twenty20 Cricket has exploded in popularity since it’s inception and the International Cricket Council should really be pressing hard for its inclusion in the Olympics. The game would easily fit with the schedule; it’s not going to take all day to play one game. It should be quite easy to play about four games on the one pitch and the matches have generally attracted big crowds. For the ICC it presents a perfect opportunity to market the game of cricket to the non-cricket playing nations.

The ICC has tried by using a tiered system, the World Cricket League, but it is still the 50-over game and it just hasn’t gained the interest that the ICC would have hoped for. The structure of it is complicated and surely the teams in the fifth division that fail would just be disenchanted with the whole system. Twenty20 has produced a number of upsets in the past. With big hitting all you really need in the game, a non-test playing nation would be capable of producing that much, and if the tickets were reasonably priced the crowds would flock in, like Handball at the Sydney Olympics.

The International Olympic Committee are the group with the final say. The fact that it is a relatively new game might tempt the IOC to consider it, and they would also have to consider the enormous popularity of the Twenty20 game, especially in Asia.