More women than men will compete at the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, the International Olympic Committee said Wednesday, a revelation unprecedented in Olympic history going back to ancient Greece.
The announcement was the standout statistic among a host of figures released about the Summer Games set for July 14-30, 2028. These included the exact number of events that will be contested (a record 351, 22 more than Paris), the number of athletes who will compete there (10,500, plus another 698 competing in sports specific to this Olympics), and expanded team women’s team participation in soccer, water polo, and 3×3 basketball.
For those keeping score, the final tally for LA 2028 is Women 5,655, Men 5,543, with women making up 50.5 percent of participants. It’s a far cry from where women’s sport stood a century ago, when 135 women and 2,954 men took part at the Paris 1924 Olympics, and even further from the ancient Games in Olympia, where women were prohibited from attending the event.*
The IOC has also guaranteed that there will be just as many women’s teams as men’s in all Olympic tournaments when the Games open three years from now. It had added additional quota places for water polo (whose women’s competition gains two teams), 3×3 basketball (where four more women’s teams have been added), and soccer, where there will actually be more female teams (16) than male ones (12) in the tournament.
“This reflects the growth of women’s football around the world; it’s one of the most popular, fastest-growing forms of sport around the world. We’ve seen incredible growth in women’s participation in team sport, popularity, and visibility of women’s team sport with women’s football being an absolute leader in that regard,” said IOC Sports Director Kit McConnell.
“Women’s football and men’s football have both been hugely successful in the Olympic Games in terms of ticketing, and broadcast audiences, media coverage around the world, and what better place to increase the number of women’s teams than the USA itself? [They are]
multiple women’s world champions, hugely popular.”
In boxing, an additional women’s weight category has been added, bringing the total to seven, the same as men’s.
These changes are a nod to the IOC’s commitment to achieve complete gender equality at the Olympics, as well as the growing popularity of women’s sport around the globe. “Female participation in the Olympic Games has remained a centre focus, and the final program provides a powerful platform for female athletes around the world,” McConnell added.
The numbers were announced as IOC President-elect Kirsty Coventry, a seven-time Olympic medallist herself, presided over her first IOC Board meeting. Since her election last month, the Zimbabwe native has been in the midst of transitioning to her new role, which she will officially take up in June.
New twists on old Olympic sports
In addition to the numbers, the announcement of new mixed team events in several of the Olympics’s traditional sports including artistic gymnastics, track and field, archery, golf, rowing, and table tennis came as a pleasant surprise.
The details are still being kept under wraps in some sports, including gymnastics. The uber-popular sport has never had a mixed team event at the Games and has not added a major event since trampoline made its debut in Sydney 25 years ago.
Artistic gymnastics does have a smattering of mixed events, notably the annual Swiss Cup in Zurich, where one man and one woman, usually from the same country, perform routines on preferred apparatus, with their scores added together to form a team score. The DTB Pokal in Germany has also offered a mixed team event at the conclusion of its spring competition in recent years, but it has never been part of World Cups or the World Championships.
Something similar takes place in golf, where the Grant Thornton Invitational, organized since 2023, features PGA and LPGA players teaming up in Naples, Florida. A mixed team event is brand new in Olympic golf, which has had only individual men’s and women’s tournaments to this point.
Additionally, track and field will add a 4×100 mixed relay, joining the mixed 4×400 meter track and field event first held at the Tokyo Games in 2021. A new mixed team event is also in the works in table tennis. Archery gains a mixed team event in compound, a bowstyle developed in the United States that uses cams and pulleys that differs from the recurve style that has always been used at the Olympics.
Los Angeles will mark the debut of a “coastal beach sprint rowing” in addition to “classic” rowing races in a first for the sport, which has just over 500 athletes at every Games. Sixty four quota places have been allocated for the new event, whose three medal events for women’s solo, men’s solo, and mixed double sculls will make up one fifth of the LA 2028 rowing competition. World Rowing’s Congress recently added several mixed events, including a Mixed Eight, to its World Championships schedule. Mixed Eight in particular “has been met with strong interest by the IOC,” World Rowing reported, hinting that it might become an Olympic event in 2032.
In all, 36 sports will be contested at Los Angeles 2028. All but five — baseball/softball, cricket, flag football, lacrosse, and squash — have appeared steadily on the Olympic programme for decades. Six men’s and six women’s teams will take part in baseball and softball, cricket, flag football, and lacrosse. Squash, an individual sport, will feature 16 men and 16 women competing for Olympic titles.
Flag football will feature 10-person teams, but one of the biggest questions is whether current NFL players will be allowed to participate. Prominent flag football tournaments in the United States have in the past featured a slate of retired greats the likes of Terrell Owens, Michael Vick, and Chad Ochocinco Johnson.
Olympic history in the offing?
New team sports can lead to surprising outcomes. When women’s field hockey was added to the sport for the 1980 Games in Moscow, an unlikely Zimbabwean team wound up winning the gold. It was the first Olympic medal for the southern African nation and remained so until Coventry came along two decades later.
In swimming, which has more medal events than any other summer Olympic sport, a smattering of 50 meter races have been added. In addition to the men’s and women’s 50 meter free, a staple in the pool since 1988, golds will be available in the 50 meter backstroke, breaststroke, and butterfly, bringing the total number of swimming titles to 43.
Sport climbing, which made a splash in its Tokyo Olympic debut, is expanding too: In Los Angeles, boulder and lead climbing will be split into separate medal events. The two had been grouped together at the Games until now.
It is in the nature of Olympic Sports Federations to ask the IOC to add more events and athlete quota places for their sports. Of the 31 international sports federations whose sports are part of the Games, 24 of them requested additions for LA 2028, The Guardian reported, and had all of the wishes been granted there would have been 46 new medal events.
“The final program was shaped by guiding principles set in 2023, which emphasized global appeal, cost-efficiency, athlete focus and gender balance,” the IOC added. Much the same can be expected four years from now when Brisbane puts its Olympic schedule together.