Netball and the Olympic Movement
| Highest governing body | International Federation of Netball Associations |
|---|---|
| Presence | |
| Olympic | IOC-recognised, 1995 Never featured at the Games |
Netball is an Olympic recognised sport, a status attained in 1995 after a twenty-year period of lobbying. It has never been played at the Summer Olympics, but with recognition a formal requirement for inclusion is met. The absence at the Olympic Games was seen by the netball community as a hindrance to the global growth of the game, depriving it of media attention and funding. Inclusion is hampered, because it is mainly played by women, and mostly in Commonwealth countries. When the sport gained recognition, it opened up sources of funds that the global netball community had not been able to access before, including the International Olympic Committee (IOC), national Olympic committees and sports organisations, and state and federal governments.
We know we can't compete against football and rugby but to have more recognition and insight into the sport would be great
According to Dyer in 1982, exclusion of netball from the Summer Olympics is part of the historical pattern of the slow growth and gradual acceptance of women's sports. Women first competed in the 1900 Summer Olympics in only three sports: tennis, croquet and golf. Women's cycling was excluded for many years despite having world championships organised by 1958.Field hockey, a sport included for men as early as 1908, was not open to competition by women until 1980. By the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona, there were 159 medal events for men, but only 86 for women, and 12 for both men and women, and as late as 1996, 26 countries sent no women to the Olympics. There were still sports that excluded women at the 2000 Summer Olympics, such as boxing, wrestling and baseball. At the 2012 Summer Olympics, every country but Nauru did, and both men and women competed in 34 sports.
...
Wikipedia