BLOGS
The Olympic Netball Mystery: A Global Sport Inexplicably Left on the Sidelines
Have you ever noticed how the world's most-played women's team sport is nowhere to be found when the Olympic flame is lit? Each Olympiad passes with swimming, athletics, and even relatively niche pursuits like modern pentathlon taking centre stage, whilst Netball—a sport with over 20 million participants globally—remains conspicuously absent from the programme.
As someone who's spent years watching both basketball and Netball courts from London's community centres to elite arenas, I've often wondered: how can a sport so widespread, so professionally developed, and so deeply embedded in Commonwealth sporting culture be perpetually left out in the Olympic cold?
The answer, it turns out, reveals more about Olympic politics, global sporting power dynamics, and gender inequality than it does about Netball itself.
The Invisible Giant: Netball's Global Footprint That Nobody Seems to Notice
When I mention netball's Olympic absence to American friends who visit London, I'm typically met with blank stares. "Netball? Is that like basketball but with a net?" The comparison isn't entirely wrong, but it misses the cultural significance entirely. Across the Commonwealth—from England to Australia, Jamaica to South Africa—Netball isn't just played; it's revered. The 2019 Netball World Cup final drew a television audience of 8.5 million in England and Australia alone, numbers that would make many Olympic sports blush with envy.
According to the International Netball Federation, over 70 countries actively participate in the sport, with professional leagues operating in Australia, New Zealand, England, and South Africa. The Suncorp Super Netball League in Australia boasts average player salaries of AUD$67,000 (approximately £35,000), making it one of the highest-paying women's sports leagues in the country.
Yet, when the Olympic carousel comes around every four years, netball remains the uninvited guest at the party.
The Catch-22 of Olympic Inclusion: You Need Global Reach to Get In, But Olympic Status to Gain Global Reach
Olympic inclusion follows a paradoxical logic that has trapped Netball in a frustrating cycle. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) evaluates sports based on their global footprint, gender equality, youth appeal, and television marketability. Netball, despite its popularity, faces a geographical challenge: its strongholds are primarily in Commonwealth countries.
"It's a vicious circle," explains Dr. Louise Mansfield, Professor of Sport, Health and Social Sciences at Brunel University London. "Without Olympic inclusion, it's difficult for sports to attract the funding and exposure needed to develop globally. Yet without global development, the IOC is reluctant to include them."
This sporting catch-22 has kept Netball in Olympic purgatory. The sport remains concentrated in former British colonies, with minimal penetration in continental Europe, large parts of Asia, and crucially, the United States—the Olympic movement's commercial powerhouse. In 2019, World Netball launched development programmes targeting non-traditional Netball nations, but progress remains slow without the Olympic spotlight that accelerates global sporting development.
The Basketball Shadow: How Being "Almost Like" Another Sport Becomes Your Biggest Liability
"It looks a bit like basketball"—perhaps the most damning five words in Netball's Olympic aspirations. To the uninitiated eye, the similarities between Netball and basketball present what Olympic programmers consider a fatal flaw: redundancy.
The IOC, perpetually walking the tightrope between tradition and innovation, is notorious for avoiding sports that appear to duplicate existing Olympic offerings. Basketball, with its American-driven global marketing machine and NBA-fuelled popularity, has claimed the "ball in hoop" territory of the Olympic programme.
What this surface-level comparison misses is the fundamentally different skills, strategies, and physical demands of Netball. The sport's unique positions, its prohibition on running with the ball, and its emphasis on space creation and precision passing create a wholly different sporting spectacle. The Australian Institute of Sport has documented how Netball players require distinct physical attributes from basketball players, with elite Netballers demonstrating exceptional change-of-direction abilities and positional specialisation that basketball simply doesn't develop.
"Reducing netball to 'basketball's cousin' is like saying rugby is just American football without the helmets," argues Pamela Cookey, former England Netball captain. "It's a fundamental misunderstanding of the sport's unique characteristics and challenges."
The Unspoken Truth: Gender Politics and the Olympic Movement
Let's address the elephant in the room: Netball's historical development as a women's sport has unquestionably influenced its Olympic exclusion. While men's Netball exists and is growing, the sport remains predominantly female-participated and female-watched. In a sporting world where men's competitions still command the lion's share of media coverage, sponsorship, and administrative attention, Netball's female-centric nature has worked against it.
The statistics tell a compelling story. A 2018 UNESCO report on gender equality in sports found that women's sports receive just 4% of total sports media coverage, despite women making up approximately 40% of all sports participants. When women's sports do receive coverage, traditionally "feminine" sports like gymnastics and figure skating dominate the airtime.
The IOC has made public commitments to gender equality, most notably achieving gender parity in athlete participation at Tokyo 2020. However, this balance has largely been achieved by adding women's events in traditionally male-dominated sports rather than introducing sports with predominantly female participation.
Dr. Sarah Murray of the University of Sydney argues: "There's an underlying assumption that women's sports must prove their commercial viability in ways that men's sports never had to. Netball has built sustainable professional leagues and impressive viewership, yet still faces questions about marketability that would never be asked of equivalent men's sports."
The Commonwealth Games: A Consolation Prize or Legitimate Alternative?
Netball enthusiasts often point to the sport's prominence in the Commonwealth Games as evidence of its international standing. The quadrennial competition features netball as a core sport, with matches frequently ranking among the most-watched events of the Games.
However, the Commonwealth Games' significance pales in comparison to the Olympics. The viewing figures tell the story: the 2018 Commonwealth Games reached a global audience of 1.5 billion, while the 2016 Rio Olympics reached 3.6 billion. More crucially, Olympic inclusion unlocks funding streams that can transform a sport's development. UK Sport, for example, allocated £345 million to Olympic sports for the Tokyo cycle, compared to just £4 million for Commonwealth-only sports.
"The Commonwealth Games keeps netball in the international spotlight, but it's not enough," says Karen Atkinson, former England international. "Without Olympic inclusion, we're fighting for scraps when it comes to funding, media coverage, and commercial partnerships."
Breaking the Mould: How Skateboarding, Surfing and Breaking Made the Olympic Cut
The recent additions to the Olympic programme provide both hope and frustration for Netball supporters. Tokyo 2020 welcomed skateboarding, surfing, and sport climbing, while Paris 2024 will introduce breaking (breakdancing). These additions reflect the IOC's stated commitment to urban sports that appeal to younger audiences.
What netball advocates find perplexing is that these sports gained inclusion despite having significantly fewer registered participants than netball. World Skate estimates there are about 85 million skateboarders worldwide, but the number of competitive, organised participants is far lower than netball's 20 million. Similarly, breaking has an estimated 1 million participants globally—a fraction of netball's reach.
The critical difference appears to be geographical distribution and youth appeal. Breaking, for instance, has vibrant scenes across the Americas, Europe, and Asia, giving it the global spread that netball lacks. The IOC's focus on rejuvenating its ageing audience has also prioritised sports with strong youth participation and social media followings.
"It's not just about how many people play your sport—it's about where they play it and how many people will watch it on television," explains Olympic historian Dr. David Goldblatt. "The IOC is first and foremost a broadcast entity, and decisions are made with viewers—particularly American viewers—in mind."
The Way Forward: From Olympic Outsider to Olympic Contender
For netball to break its Olympic impasse, the sport faces the challenge of expanding beyond its Commonwealth comfort zone while maintaining its unique identity. Several strategic pathways exist:
Geographic Expansion
World Netball has initiated development programmes in strategic regions, particularly focusing on the Americas and continental Europe. The United States, with its robust collegiate women's sports infrastructure, represents a particular opportunity. The introduction of Walking Netball has also opened the sport to older participants and mixed-gender participation, broadening its appeal.
Format Innovation
Fast5 Netball, a shortened version of the game with modified rules, represents netball's answer to Twenty20 cricket or rugby sevens—both shorter formats that have dramatically expanded their sports' reach. Rugby sevens' Olympic inclusion in 2016 followed the format's global popularity surge, providing a template for netball to follow.
Strategic Alliances
Building connections with basketball rather than distancing from it might offer unexpected benefits. The International Basketball Federation (FIBA) maintains significant influence within Olympic circles. A collaborative approach that positions Netball and basketball as complementary rather than competing sports could yield political advantages.
The Final Whistle: What Netball's Olympic Exclusion Tells Us About Sport and Society
Netball's continued absence from the Olympics reveals uncomfortable truths about how we value women's sports, how global sporting institutions make decisions, and how colonial sporting legacies continue to shape our international sporting landscape.
The sport's Olympic journey isn't just about adding another medal event to an already packed programme. It's about acknowledging that sports predominantly played and watched by women deserve equal recognition. It's about questioning whether truly global sports should be defined by American television preferences. And it's about recognising that the path to Olympic inclusion isn't always a meritocratic one.
As the 2024 Paris Games came and went, Netball players once again watched from the sidelines. Their sport—faster-paced than basketball, more tactically complex than handball, and with higher participation numbers than many Olympic sports—remains excluded from humanity's greatest sporting stage.
The question isn't whether netball deserves Olympic status—the numbers and the sport's professional development make that case convincingly. The real question is whether the Olympic movement is willing to evolve beyond its traditional power centres and genuinely embrace sporting diversity.
For now, 20 million netball players continue waiting for an answer.
Why Are Some Sports So F***ing Hard?
The Impossible Pursuit
Watch Ronnie O'Sullivan at a snooker table and you'll witness something that defies conventional understanding of human capability. His cue becomes less a wooden instrument and more an extension of his consciousness—each shot executed with such fluid precision that physics itself seems to bend to his will. Yet for every O'Sullivan, there are millions who've picked up a cue only to discover that potting even the simplest ball requires a coordination that feels frustratingly unattainable.
This vast gulf—between the masters and the rest of us—exists not just in snooker but across a pantheon of sporting disciplines. It raises a fascinating question that cuts to the heart of human potential: What makes certain sports so fiendishly difficult to master? Not just challenging to learn, but nearly impossible to perfect—pursuits where even elite practitioners spend lifetimes chasing an elusive horizon of mastery that continuously recedes before them.
The answers challenge everything we think we know about athletic achievement.
Beyond the 10,000 Hour Myth
The popular narrative suggests that expertise in any field requires roughly 10,000 hours of dedicated practice. This comforting simplification, drawn from Malcolm Gladwell's interpretation of Anders Ericsson's research, suggests a democratic path to excellence: put in the time, reap the rewards.
But certain sports laugh in the face of this equation.
Take golf. Tiger Woods had accumulated well over 10,000 hours of practice before he was twelve. Most PGA professionals have similarly staggering practice histories, yet the average professional round hovers around 70 strokes—far from perfection. The sport's fundamental challenge lies in its deceptive simplicity: hitting a stationary ball towards a fixed target shouldn't be this difficult. Yet the interplay between biomechanics, psychology, and environmental factors creates a perfect storm of complexity.
Professor Mark Smith of the Sports Psychology Institute notes: "Golf requires a paradoxical combination of total relaxation and absolute precision. The muscles must be loose whilst the focus must be laser-sharp. This contradictory demand creates a psychological hurdle that many athletes never overcome."
That's why fewer than 0.1% of people who take up golf will ever break par consistently on a championship course. The gulf between competence and mastery isn't just wide—it's oceanic.
The Cruel Mathematics of Precision Sports
The hardest sports to master often share a common trait: unforgiving precision requirements coupled with minimal margins for error.
Consider cricket batting. Facing a cricket ball bowled at 145 km/h gives a batter approximately 0.4 seconds to:
Recognise the type of delivery
Calculate its trajectory
Decide whether and how to play it
Execute the appropriate shot
This decision-making cascade must happen almost unconsciously, which explains why even world-class batsmen like Joe Root or Virat Kohli fail more often than they succeed. Their career batting averages—hovering around 50—mean they're getting out roughly every other innings despite being among the greatest to ever play the sport.
"The neural pathways required for elite cricket batting take decades to develop," explains Dr. Rajesh Kumar, neuroscientist and former cricket analyst. "We're asking the human brain to perform calculations and physical responses that evolution never prepared us for."
Similar mathematical cruelty exists in archery, where Olympic-level accuracy requires controlling variables down to the sub-millimetre. A 1mm error at the bow becomes a miss of several centimetres at 70 metres—the difference between gold and nothing.
The Paradox of Water
If land-based sports weren't challenging enough, water introduces a whole new dimension of difficulty. Swimming, particularly at elite levels, represents one of the most technically demanding physical puzzles humans have created for themselves.
"Swimming fast is fundamentally counterintuitive," says former Olympic coach Miranda Harding. "Everything your body naturally wants to do in water is exactly what slows you down."
The paradox is this: to move efficiently through water, swimmers must master techniques that feel completely unnatural. The high-elbow catch in freestyle, for instance, requires positioning the arm in a way that feels awkward and weak but actually generates maximum propulsion. The body must remain horizontal despite its natural tendency to sink at the legs. Breathing must be perfectly timed and asymmetrical.
Even more perplexing is the discipline of butterfly—a stroke so technically demanding that it wasn't even invented until the 1930s, centuries after other competitive strokes were established. The full-body wave motion required for efficient butterfly demands extraordinary coordination between seemingly contradictory movements.
Former Olympic gold medallist Ian Thorpe once remarked, "When people ask what I think about in the water, they're surprised when I say 'everything.' Every finger position, hip rotation, head angle—all simultaneously. It's like playing chess whilst performing ballet."
The Psychological Abyss of Singles Tennis
What makes tennis particularly fascinating is how it combines technical complexity with psychological warfare. Unlike team sports where responsibility is shared, or sports with coaches providing real-time guidance, tennis players are islands unto themselves during competition.
"Tennis is the loneliest sport," seven-time Grand Slam champion Mats Wilander once said. "You're completely exposed, with nowhere to hide your weaknesses."
The mental fortitude required becomes clear when examining match statistics. A player can win more points than their opponent and still lose the match. They can play brilliantly for two hours, then have everything unravel in moments of pressure. The typical four-hour Grand Slam match features only about 20 minutes of actual ball-in-play time—the rest is psychological recovery, preparation, and internal battle.
Dr. Sarah Richards, sports psychologist who has worked with several Grand Slam champions, explains: "What makes tennis mastery so elusive is that the technical skills—already incredibly difficult—become almost irrelevant if the mental framework collapses. I've seen players who can hit perfect shots in practice completely disintegrate under match pressure."
This explains why, even at the elite level, players like Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal separated themselves from merely excellent players through psychological resilience more than technical superiority.
The Impossible Equilibrium of Gymnastics
If you're seeking the perfect storm of physical, technical, and psychological challenges, look no further than artistic gymnastics. Perhaps no other sport demonstrates such a brutal combination of requirements: strength-to-weight ratio, flexibility, spatial awareness, courage, and precision timing.
The floor exercise alone requires athletes to generate enough power to launch themselves metres into the air while maintaining such precise body control that they can land within centimetres of their target—all whilst creating an illusion of effortlessness.
"What makes gymnastics particularly difficult to master is that you're essentially fighting physics in real-time," explains former Olympic gymnast and coach Helena Bonham. "You must generate enormous force, then control it with absolute precision, all while remembering complex sequences and making split-second adjustments mid-air."
The margin for error is virtually non-existent. A 0.1-second miscalculation on a release move on the high bar can be the difference between perfect execution and catastrophic injury.
Simone Biles, widely regarded as the greatest gymnast of all time, still experiences the phenomenon known as "the twisties"—a terrifying disconnection between mind and body where spatial awareness suddenly vanishes mid-air. This demonstrates how even the supreme masters of the sport remain vulnerable to its fundamental challenges.
The Enigma of Pole Vault
Some sports are difficult because they ask humans to perform actions so far removed from natural movement patterns that they verge on the absurd. Pole vault stands as perhaps the ultimate example.
Think about what pole vaulting actually requires: sprinting at maximum speed whilst carrying a long, unwieldy pole; planting that pole with precision timing into a small box; converting horizontal momentum into vertical lift; inverting your entire body whilst rising; clearing a bar with your entire body; then safely falling 5-6 metres without injury.
"It's like trying to parallel park at 30 km/h," jokes former world champion Sergey Bubka. "Except the parking space is 6 metres in the air, and your car turns upside down in the process."
The technical complexity explains why pole vault typically requires 8-10 years of training before athletes reach international competitiveness—one of the longest development periods in track and field.
Sports scientist Dr. Alan Hernandez notes: "Pole vault may be the most technically complex event in all of athletics. The neurological patterns required simply don't exist in natural human movement. They must be built from scratch through thousands of repetitions."
The Endless Pursuit
What these sports share is not just difficulty, but a particular quality of difficulty—one where the horizon of mastery continuously recedes. Just when you think you've solved the puzzle, new dimensions of challenge emerge.
There's something profoundly revealing about these supremely difficult disciplines. They remind us that human potential, while vast, still has boundaries—boundaries that the most dedicated athletes spend lifetimes pushing against, approaching asymptotically, but never quite breaking through.
And in their struggle, we find something universally compelling: the beauty of pursuing perfection while knowing it remains, always, just beyond our grasp.
The GOAT Files: Alexander Ovechkin
There are two kinds of greatness in sport. The type you admire. And the type you feel. Wayne Gretzky was the former: a surgical genius with no hair out of place, floating through the game like a polite ghost. Alexander Ovechkin? He’s the other kind. The kind that shows up sweaty, snarling, slightly overcooked, and asks where the beer is. You don’t watch Ovechkin play hockey. You watch him invade it.
He entered the NHL like a punchline you couldn’t defend against. The hair? Chaotic. The grin? Weaponised. The shot? Ludicrous. You’d think a guy scoring 50 goals from the exact same spot on the ice for nearly 20 years would get predictable. But it never did. That’s the Ovi paradox. He told you exactly what he was going to do – then did it anyway. With force. With fire. With a kind of joyful brutality that made goaltenders reconsider their life choices.
And through all of it – the records, the rocket shots, the ridiculous celebrations – he never stopped being him. No attempt at polish. No pretend humility. He skated like a man late for a flight, hit like a semi, and celebrated like the game had just been invented. Every. Single. Time.
There’s a moment – burned into hockey lore – where a 20-year-old Ovechkin scores The Goal. He’s falling. Twisting. On his back. Stick upside down. Puck somehow in the net. It’s impossible. It’s stupid. It’s perfect. What no one tells you is that this was just the start of the madness. Because if Gretzky made hockey look elegant, Ovechkin made it look like rock and roll: messy, loud, brilliant, and alive.
And then came the failure.
For nearly a decade, he was labelled The Guy Who Can’t Win. The Capitals imploded every spring. Ovechkin’s teams played beautiful, doomed hockey. The league shrugged. Of course Crosby was the one lifting Cups. He was neat. Canadian. Marketable. Ovechkin was the chaos goblin with the bad tan and a better shot. For years, the narrative refused to change. Maybe he was just a regular-season freak. Maybe greatness came with asterisks.
Then came 2018.
Ovechkin didn’t just win the Stanley Cup. He unleashed it. A decade of frustration exploded in fountains, parades, Instagram stories, and beer showers. It wasn’t a victory lap – it was a spiritual exorcism. He swam with the Cup. He drank from it. He may have proposed to it. That summer, even fans who hated him were forced to admit: this wasn’t just overdue. It was epic. Like watching Thor finally lift the hammer.
But it wasn’t all goals and glory. Ovechkin’s story has shadows, too. His deep ties to Russia – and Vladimir Putin – have followed him like a second jersey. When the world shifted, and war broke out, Ovi was caught between allegiances. Asked to speak out, he hedged. Pleaded for “no more war.” It wasn’t enough. It was never going to be. But it also wasn’t simple. His family is there. His roots are there. His silence – whether political or pragmatic – became its own kind of controversy. One the history books won’t ignore.
On the ice, he had his flaws, too. Lazy backchecks. Dirty hits. A few suspensions. Coaches tried to tame him. Good luck with that. He was benched. Criticised. Accused of selfishness. And every time, he responded the same way: he scored. You could hate the style. You couldn’t argue with the substance.
Because here’s the thing: Ovechkin broke hockey. Quietly, at first. Then loudly. In an era of analytics, he played like a throwback. In a league desperate for personalities, he was one. He didn’t evolve to fit the NHL. The NHL evolved to survive him. A Russian-born, gap-toothed, power-forward sniper who never changed his spot, his shot, or his smile – and still conquered everything in front of him.
He is, statistically, the greatest goal-scorer of his generation. And has finally broken Gretzky’s record. The one that was supposed to be unreachable. Untouchable. Eternal. It’s not. Not anymore.
And that might be the most remarkable part. For all the thunder, for all the spectacle, his greatness is rooted in something heartbreakingly human. Every glove kiss? For Sergei. Every goal? A continuation of something that ended too soon. Ovechkin never played for legacy. He played for love. And that’s why people who don’t even like hockey love him anyway.
One day soon, they’ll build a statue outside Capital One Arena. It won’t be him skating. Or shooting. It’ll be him screaming – wide-eyed, arms outstretched, half-mad with joy. Because that’s what he gave us. Not just numbers. Not just trophies. But a reminder that sport should feel like this: bold, flawed, explosive, unforgettable.
If Gretzky was the Great One, Ovechkin is the Last One. The final rockstar in a sport of polished machines. The Russian wrecking ball who broke records, drank from fountains, and never faked a single thing.
And the record?
It’s waiting.
So is the world.