With snooker already ruled out of the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo, It’s kind of depressing that we will have to wait until at least 2024 for inclusion, and I’m just wondering why is snooker rejected. From my own research on the Olympics ‘new sports’ inclusion, I’ve come to realise why they have yet to include snooker in the Olympics.
World-wide players
If you look at most sports seen in the Olympics, you will notice that all the major countries of the world have athletes taking part. These include Britain, China, USA, Germany, Russia, Japan, Italy, France and so on.
Unfortunately snooker as it stands has a player pool for a limited amount of countries. For the most part these include Britain and China. There are players playing snooker from many different countries but for the most part snooker is limited to these two countries.
If snooker was in this years Olympics, gold, silver and bronze medals would all go to Britain and China being realistic, and that will not work in the Olympic format.
For the Olympics to include snooker, we would need some of the bigger countries to have players to make it viable. The sport cannot exist in an Olympic environment with only a pool of 6/7 countries with players, and only 2 of those countries dominating the sport.
Female Players
The Olympics by nature has participation of males and females in each sport to a high standard. Snooker has a growing number of female players and it will only be a few years before the women start reaching standards similar to their male counterparts. Until such time, the Olympics will not include snooker.
So what can be done?
Well i predict it could be at least 15 years before snooker is included in the Olympics. The good news is that snooker is growing fast throughout the world, and it will be only a matter of time before snooker becomes an Olympic sport. When some of the larger countries such as Germany, USA, France etc get involved more, then we have a realistic chance of joining the Olympics.
As for Pool (a game i know little about), i do not understand why this is excluded.
