Games without frontiers

Which is the most international sport?

At the Olympics we have an opportunity not only to see the world compete with itself at sport, but to see sports vie for attention against each other. In 2004 I was living in China - I could name all the world's greatest badminton and table tennis stars, and saw not a single second of the equestrian competition. In Croatia in the run-up to the 2012 Games, I might have thought from the TV promotion that handball and water polo were the only sports being contested, while at the Deutsches Haus the importance of dressage to the German audience hit home. Even with every minute of every sport being broadcast live in London, it was rare to stumble across at least half of the contests - some friends found it hard to accept that China was going toe to toe with the US, as their successes were in sports little celebrated by the main coverage. Every region has a natural attention bias, just as every sport - even football - has a heartland of support. Every sport at the Olympics is international, but some are without doubt more international than others.

The Olympics, then, gives us an opportunity to ask a different question - which is the most globalised sport? 

Which sport has the active attention and participation of the most countries, with the most equal spread of success? Football may be global, but the chances of a World Cup winner coming from Asia, North America, or even Africa are slim. Cricket on the other hand, is competed with broadly even chances across continents, despite the small number of countries. The entire world runs, but it is now fairly rare to find sprint winners from outside the Caribbean and North America, or to find distance winners from beyond East Africa. Indeed, at what point do sports that are little more than basic uncodified elements of human survival - running, swimming, fighting, even hunting, fishing, dancing even become 'sport'?

We are dealing with a pre-selected sample. The IOC already has the largely thankless task of managing the sports and discipline of the Olympic programme, not to mention the federations. In 2012 there were 26 sports, with two joining in 2016, eight competing for accession in 2020, and 25 more 'recognised' and eligible for future accession. To be 'recognised' is to meet the basic requirements of 'international sport' - they are played widely and competed by a large number of nations around the world; to be competed at the Olympics is the highest achievement of being considered international. They should not appear insular in amongst the Olympic schedule - despite the mass of cricket fans, the few number of countries they follow would make it appear so. An Olympic cricket competition (at the current state of the game) would be competed by a small number of similar countries, and might struggle to attract the world's greatest players - the same reasons that baseball and softball were dropped.

So which sports attract the greatest representation?

Most and least represented sports at the 2012 Summer Olympics (percent of total NOCs with representation)

Measure of participation is, in many ways, predetermined by the governing federation, but it is a fair assumption that, with few exceptions where the federations are deliberate in trying to stem a country's dominance (table tennis, track cycling, more later), the representation criteria are a fair reflection of world competition: the Olympic hierarchy which influences it is long established.

This is misleading, however. 

Some disciplines, particularly those with weight classes and individual competitors (judo, boxing), will naturally attract and encourage wider representation; others, particularly team sports with complex round robin competitions and one winner for each gender, will naturally have fewer. With athletics, too, we must consider that, as the tournament showcase, many countries which have otherwise failed to qualify athletes choose to enter their wildcards into the men's 100m, thus inflating its participation (only Aruba, Bhutan, Luxembourg and Nauru entered no athletes). That said, everyone runs - certainly more people run than row - so as an indicator of the line between action and sport, more than as the Olympic showcase event, perhaps it's only apt that it has the highest representation.


We can see that breadth of engagement is no indication of being internationally competed. Several sports are dominated by individual countries, regardless of the number of countries competing. 57 competed in table tennis, but China won every gold; in archery too, 45 countries entered, but Korea won all but one gold (and that one was a shock). Conversely, few in the big-two medal team events were there to make up the numbers. Even swimming, despite being the sport with the second highest number of participating countries, had nearly half the gold medals won by one country (the US). In fact, only nine countries won golds in the pool (or the Serpentine), meaning that each gold winning country won an average of c.4 golds each - only fewer than for badminton and table tennis, which were whitewashed by China. It tops the chart for the equivalent number for all medal colours. Despite the wide range of representation (166 countries in 2012) and large number of medals available, swimming success is dominated by a small number of countries, and the US in particular.



This can also apply to regions. In an effort to stop British dominance in the velodrome, countries were limited to one entrant per event. In the end, 7 of the 10 gold medals went to Britain - but 9 out of 10 went to Western European nations, and the other to Australia; hardly global success for a global sport. If all countries are encouraged to enter token athletes, but every medal goes to athletes from Western Europe, it can be hardly be considered globalised; indeed, it could almost be considered a failing of the federation in using selection criteria which are untrue to the realities of the global state of play. Better, surely, to have fewer countries represented, and a higher level of competition?

NOC success by sport - percent of total NOCs represented, winning medals and winning gold; listed by percent of competing NOCs winning gold (top four and bottom four only shown)

I propose, therefore, a measure of globalisation, calculated on just the basis not of participation, but also on the results of an individual competition; in this case, the competitions at the 2012 summer Games. It is calculated using the statistics above, amongst others; sports achieve a higher index score for athletes from a greater number of countries represented; but this is tempered if certain countries, regions or continents are dominant. In a test scenario, in which every country enters an equal number of athletes, and every region and continent wins an equal number of medals and gold medals, the highest index score is roughly 100. (This is, of course, extremely unlikely) The results look like this:

It should be little surprise that athletics and swimming are two of the most 'globalised', with the greatest number of medals available and athletes competing. The nature of the competitions - short, multi-participatory races - encourages mass representation. However, this is not true amongst other racing sports (shown in blue) with multiple medals: canoe sprint, for instance, scores low thanks to its consistent domination by European countries. The knockout martial arts in purple - boxing, judo etc. - also achieve a universality of form combined with an encouragingly global format. They score consistently high on the index - even fairly Eurocentric fencing, which has relatively strong success in Asia and the Americas, scores well.

On the other hand, the grey bars are all the large team sports with two medals available, which require a lot of complex competition for comparatively few results (one winning women's team and one winning men's team). The score will fluctuate greatly depending on relatively small throws of the dice - even with the water polo winners coming from different continents, the extent of European dominance throughout the fairly small competition comes through in its low score.

We can see that the format alone is no barrier to being a global sport - even in its neutered Olympic format, far smaller than other Olympic sports, football remains one of the most global presences. In fact, you can see below, in comparison with the 2010 and 2011 FIFA World Cups, that the Olympic competition is in fact more global in terms of representation and performance than the (admittedly wider watched) FIFA competitions. The tennis competition, too, with deliberately reduced numbers of players from the dominant countries, is more global in its Olympic form than at Wimbledon. Who says they don't belong at the world's Games?

New sports

Eight sports are competing for inclusion in 2020; rugby sevens and golf are joining in 2016. How might they compare in amongst the current Olympic competition? I've used what is probably the fairest comparison - the competitions at the 2009 World Games, where a number of non-Olympic sports compete in quasi-Olympic formats. Wushu and baseball / softball (which may compete under one banner, and so are shown as such) were showcased and competed respectively at Beijing 2008, so those competitions are used (Macauans are assumed to represent China); and beach soccer, which is not competed at the World Games either, is represented by the most recent World Cup (NB, there is no women's competition, and Tahitian players are assumed to represent France). For golf and rugby sevens, the 2012 Opens and London Sevens have been used, as they appear to be closest in format and representation to the 2016 competitions at this stage.



Karate, it seems, should have IOC members' votes if they are concerned about the global nature of the sport alone. It has a very similar profile to other martial arts, with a large number of medals and wide breadth of countries competing at even levels. It does remain significantly behind taekwondo and judo, but would be one of the most 'global' sports at the Games, more so than fencing. Wushu, on the other hand, suffers from dominance by China and East Asia. Nevertheless, with space for another Asian martial art, and the leading Korean and Japanese martial arts already represented, wushu may be perceived as a chance to offer a more global programme as a whole.

Racquet sports, on the other hand, are very well represented already, although every Olympics is accompanied by grumblings about tennis's place. While the ATP has succeeded in raising the profile of Olympic tennis, it remains a hugely popular global sport with fairly localised centres of excellence - the US and Eastern Europe for women, Western Europe for men. And so squash, it seems, would be a better bet for a 'global' Games in 2020 - if there is considered room for another racquet sport.

Baseball and softball are expected to put up a strong campaign for reinclusion; the bases of their exclusion were founded on its narrow geographic appeal, compounded by a lack of elite participation. Despite the work that has been done to address these concerns since 2005, this is borne out by its index from the 2008 competition. With IOC delegates likely to be voting not just on including new sports for 2020, but also the status of existing sports, these results probably cement the fears that modern pentathlon could have its Olympic days numbered, but it is water polo that must really question its global nature, despite the depth of support in central and eastern Europe.

Appendix:

A final comparison to cheer the hearts of the IOC members. The total score for the 2012 Olympic Games as a whole is a little above the athletics competition's score at 33. An equivalent score for the other great global body of world peace and harmony, the UN? 29.

(Awarding a gold medal for each year as a permanent member of the security council, and a medal for each year on the council)