Fun and games: Netball finding Olympic code a hard one to crack

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) is committed to a 50:50 gender split after decades of female under-representation at the Olympics — but should that disadvantage a sport that was there for women when it wasn’t so fair?

Soon after Brisbane secured the rights to host the 2032 Olympics, World Netball and Netball Australia launched a joint campaign to push their case to debut on the Olympic programme.

New Zealander Shirley Hooper, vice president of World Netball, recently told RNZ there were two options for applying to get into the Olympics.

The first was to submit an application to next year’s IOC’s session, which would need a twothirds majority vote from International Olympic Committee delegates. The other option would require the Brisbane 2032 local organising committee to make an application for netball to be included as one of its local sports, no later than three years out from the event.

World Netball is in the middle of pulling a strategy together but believed its greatest chance is through the local path.

There are a number of factors that count against netball, and Hooper said being a team sport was one of them because the IOC had a cap on how many athletes it wanted.

“It’s a lot easier to include surfing or rock climbing. The minute you try and bring a team sport in, by nature of the number of athletes that you need in a team, that’s one issue.”

International broadcast appeal and global reach are other factors. Netball is played by more than 20 million people in more than 117 countries, but its popularity outside of Commonwealth countries is limited.

The gender equity incentive means the IOC wants to see a meaningful men’s component of the game.

It’s hardly surprising netball is popular with females, because it was one of the few sports offered to them at the start of the last century. At the same time, a mere 2.2 percent of participants in the Paris Olympics in 1900 were women.

Male participation in netball is increasing, but it still only makes up a small percentage of the 20 million who play the game worldwide.

Netball is predominantly played by women in elite level international competition.

Men were invited to the Fast5 World Series in 2022. It was the first time men competed in a World Netball event, but there were just three teams in the men’s division — New Zealand, Australia and England.

After a career at the top of netball governance, Kereyn Smith became the head of the NZ Olympic Committee, served as a commission member for the IOC, and until recently was vice president of the Commonwealth Games Federation.

“You need a male and a female version of the sport when you’re going in with a bid. Is there a credible male global competition? Not at this point in time,” Smith said.

“And if you don’t have male and female games, if you don’t have a modified version of the game — which

Fast5 is but it’s not necessarily universally played across the world — then it makes it harder.”

World Netball is still to decide what format of the game it submits, but a mixed Fast5 version might have the most appeal to the IOC.

While gender equity is not compulsory, it would be pretty clear to the international body that it would need to have a men’s offering as part of their pitch.

The modified version of the game, with just five players per team, would also keep numbers down.

Smith said pursuing Olympic recognition is a hard-fought battle for netball.

“And it’s a balance of how much you invest time and energy in chasing that dream, or are you better to develop your own pathway?”