Cricket at the Summer Olympics

Vélodrome de Vincennes hosted the cricket matches at the 1900 Summer Olympics in Paris.

Cricket was originally scheduled to be included in the inaugural 1896 Summer Olympics, which were held in Athens; cricket would have been the only team sport held at the Games. There were, however, insufficient entries and so no event was held.

The event was held at the 1900 Summer Olympics in Paris four years later but only two countries competed, Great Britain and hosts France. The French team was mostly represented by English expatriates while the English team was represented by Devon & Somerset Wanderers Cricket Club, so was not nationally selected. It is considered that few of the participants would have been good enough to play first-class cricket — only the British side had experience of eight such games in its side through Somerset's Montagu Toller and Alfred Bowerman.[1]

The match was played over two days with both 12-a-side teams batting two innings each and did not attract first-class status. England won the match by 158 runs to win the gold medal.[2][3] If the French had held out for five more minutes the game would have declared a draw.[4] Knowledge of the game would have been lost but for the forethought of John Symes, a member of the victorious team, who kept a scorecard in his own writing.

A cricket tournament was scheduled for 1904 Summer Olympics held in St. Louis but was eventually cancelled.[5]

Poster of the only Olympic cricket match

Cricket's governing bodies have for much of their recent history been unwilling to return to the Olympics. In particular, the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) and the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB), considered cricket's two most powerful national governing bodies, have long been opposed. More recently, the prospect of a return to the Olympics for cricket has become more likely. In March 2017, it was reported that International Cricket Council chief Dave Richardson thought the "time is right" for Olympic cricket.[6] It has been reported that the opposition of the BCCI to cricket at the Olympics has softened.[7]

Any re-introduced event would, unlike the 1900 version, also likely include a women's event. The proposed format would include eight teams split into two groups before two semi-finals and two medal matches. The likely format would be Twenty20 cricket, the shortest of the three formats of the game established at international level.[8] It has been suggested that inclusion of the sport at the Commonwealth Games could be a springboard for inclusion in the Olympic Games.[9] It was previously an event at the 1998 Commonwealth Games in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Cricket is the most popular sport in the highly populous Indian subcontinent, notably in Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, and Sri Lanka. The deadline for submissions for the initial sports programme has passed for the 2024 Summer Olympics, but hosts Paris will have an opportunity to propose events up until the IOC board meeting following the 2020 Summer Olympics.[6]

Three leading international cricket teams - England, Ireland and the West Indies - do not correspond to Olympic national teams, a problem also faced in rugby and association football. The United Kingdom competes at the Olympics as Great Britain with athletes from England, Scotland, Wales and those British Overseas Territories without their own Olympic team. Athletes from Northern Ireland can choose to represent either Great Britain or Ireland. In cricket, Scotland has its own team, Welsh players play for the England team, and the Ireland team represents the Republic and Northern Ireland together. In rugby, Team GB have to nominate one Home Nations team whose results will be used to determine whether Great Britain as a whole qualifies for the Olympics, but players from all the Home Nations can play for the combined team according to the usual Olympic rules.

The West Indies cricket team covers much of the Caribbean, which has several Olympic associations including Barbados, British Virgin Islands, Dominica, Grenada, Jamaica, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Saint Kitts and Nevis and United States Virgin Islands. Athletes from dependent territories without an Olympic association can represent the "mother country" without affecting their affiliations in other events. Thus West Indies cricketers from Anguilla and Montserrat would be eligible for Great Britain at the Olympics, and those from Sint Maarten could represent the Netherlands.

In May 2020, Eoin Morgan, the captain of the England cricket team, supported the idea of using the T10 cricket format at the Olympics.[10]