There is something about the traditional ethos of the Olympics which does question whether or not a sport is an Olympic-worthy sport – not so much whether it deserves to be a sport in its own right. A lot of people will question whether mental agility comes into play (eg motorsports) to qualify a sport as a true sport, although there’s no way that I would call chess or cards a sport. Question: Why do tennis and badminton feature in the Olympics but not squash or real tennis? Why archery and shooting but not darts (and I’m not suggesting for one moment it should be!)? It will be interesting to see which new sports are brought into play for 2016 (let’s hope darts isn’t one of them, although I can think of a few beer sponsors who would be pretty pleased).

Very well written.