The Los Angeles 2028 Olympics will function a rise in ladies’s soccer groups from 12 to 16, whereas the lads’s competitors might be downsized from 16 to a dozen groups, the Worldwide Olympic Committee mentioned on Wednesday.
The choice was a part of quite a few modifications to the Olympic occasion programme with extra blended occasions throughout a number of sports activities and all workforce sports activities with a minimum of the identical variety of ladies’s and males’s groups.
The IOC mentioned the rationale for the sharp improve in ladies’s soccer groups was the quickly rising recognition of ladies’s workforce sports activities, particularly in the US, and that change within the competitors format mirrored that fast development.
“We needed to do one thing to mirror that development and equally with the US being the house of the best stage of recognition of ladies’s soccer,” IOC sports activities director Equipment McConnell informed a press convention.
He mentioned the IOC had mentioned the problem with each LA Video games organisers and world soccer’s governing physique FIFA earlier than going via with the modifications.
The whole variety of gamers — males’s and ladies’s — wouldn’t change.
The USA, who may even host the 2026 males’s and the 2031 ladies’s World Cup, have gained 5 Olympic gold medals within the ladies’s competitors.
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The boys’s groups use largely under-23 gamers at Olympic Video games.
The LA Video games could have a complete of 351 medal occasions in all sports activities, 22 greater than at Paris 2024 Olympics.
A number of sports activities, together with archery, athletics, golf and gymnastics might be including new blended workforce occasions, with the full variety of athletes unchanged at 10,500.
The 5 sports activities proposed by the LA Video games organising committee — baseball/softball, cricket, flag soccer, lacrosse and squash — could have an additional 698 quota locations.
