Are racquet sports missing the Olympic Day’s participation engine?
- RacqI - Racquet Sports Intelligence
- 1 day ago
- 9 min read
Every June 23rd, the IOC mobilizes more than 150 events worldwide under the banner “You Can Do This! Let’s Move.” For racquet sports, the picture is more complicated — and more revealing — than it first appears.
On Olympic Day 2025, a teenager in Shanghai signed up at one of 32 community sports halls to complete a gamified movement challenge led by an Olympian on WeChat. A schoolchild in Mumbai took part in a fitness initiative backed by the Abhinav Bindra Foundation. Somewhere in one of the 150-plus participating nations, a runner laced up for the Olympic Day Run — a tradition that, since its 1987 launch across 45 countries, has grown into a genuine global mass movement.
Not one of the flagship activations in the IOC’s official program featured a padel court. No pickleball clinic. No squash taster session. And only one racquet sport — badminton — turned up with anything resembling a native “get active” response.
This asymmetry is no accident. It is a structural feature of how the Olympic participation machinery works. And for an industry watching padel and pickleball rewrite the global participation map, it raises an uncomfortable question: is the world’s most powerful sport-activation platform running on an entirely different map?
The 150 opportunities — and what they really are
The IOC’s “Let’s Move” campaign, launched in 2022, was an explicit institutional response to a documented participation deficit. The WHO finding that nearly a third of adults and four in five young people fail to meet recommended daily activity levels gave the IOC a mandate to act — and Olympic Day, observed every June 23rd, became the flagship delivery mechanism.
The 150-plus events that now populate the day are inherently sport-neutral. Olympic Day Runs. School programs. Community events. Step challenges. Olympism365 grassroots events. The China WeChat activation. The Indian school initiatives. The format is deliberately low-barrier: you need no court, no coach, and no club membership. You need a pair of shoes — or sometimes not even that.
This design logic matters. It means the campaign’s natural home is in open spaces, school gyms, and digital platforms — not in specialized facilities. And it means the sports best positioned to plug into it are those whose format can be deployed anywhere, by anyone, without infrastructure. For racquet sports, that is a high bar.
The racquet-sport scorecard: one of five
Go through each of the five major racquet sports and the picture comes into focus quickly.
Badminton is the outlier — in the best sense. The Badminton World Federation runs its own Olympic Day activation under the Let’s Move umbrella: “Olympic Day: Let’s Move for Badminton,” built around a social mechanic in which you invite a “Plus One” and are prompted to pick up a racquet or play an AirBadminton rally in the park. AirBadminton — the BWF’s purpose-built outdoor format, playable on grass, sand, or any flat surface — is the only format in any racquet sport designed specifically for low-barrier mass activation outdoors. It fits the Olympic Day template almost perfectly. Badminton is therefore the only one of the five sports that delivers what the IOC campaign actually asks for: a native “get active” response that requires no specialized court and no training prerequisite.
Tennis is in the Olympic program, but temporally decoupled. The ITF launched World Tennis Day in 2013 — its own participation moment, not aligned to June 23rd. Tennis’s contribution to getting beginners moving runs through its own programs: the ITF’s “Tennis Play and Stay” initiative, active in more than 160 nations since 2007, is explicitly designed so that beginners can serve, rally, and score from the very first lesson. That the sport needed a dedicated program to achieve basic day-one playability is an institutional admission that its natural barrier to entry is high. Tennis is present in the Olympic movement; it is simply not present on Olympic Day in a structured, federated way.
Squash is the LA28 debutant — and all of its institutional energy in 2025–26 is directed at that debut, not at June 23rd. The PSA Foundation’s Squash Summit galvanized the squash community (RSI curated) ahead of the Olympic debut (as of 2024; more recent activation data not available), and the first real milestone on the road to LA28 is not Olympic Day but the start of continental qualification, beginning with the Asian Games in Aichi-Nagoya in October. Squash’s Olympic inclusion is, as the French pro Victor Crouin put it, “a tool, not a magic bullet” (RSI curated) — one that must be actively converted into grassroots momentum. That conversion has not yet found an Olympic Day expression.
Padel does not appear in the IOC’s official Olympic Day apparatus for a simple reason: it is not in the Olympic program. It operates on a fully parallel path through continental multi-sport games — with its medal debut at the 2026 Asian Games and confirmed as a medal sport at the European Games Istanbul 2027 (RSI curated). These are meaningful milestones. But they are not the IOC participation campaign, and padel’s governance structures are not plugged into the Let’s Move infrastructure.
Pickleball is excluded by definition. It is not IOC-recognized, not part of LA28, and therefore not part of the IOC/IF-driven Olympic Day apparatus. The path to Olympic inclusion remains complex (RSI curated) and requires organized national championships, worldwide competition structures, and recognition across 60–75 countries with active female participation — a governance infrastructure that is still being built.
Where the players are and where the IOC is
Here is the tension at the heart of the story, stated plainly.
The two racquet sports with the strongest actual participation growth are padel and pickleball. According to the 2026 U.S. Tennis Participation Report based on 2025 data (RSI curated), pickleball reached 13.6 million American participants in 2025 — up from 4.2 million in 2020, a trajectory the USTA describes as part of “significant growth and increased diversification” across racquet sports. The same report records tennis at 27.3 million U.S. participants, badminton at 6.8 million, and squash at 1.3 million. Globally, padel and pickleball have posted participation growth that outpaces every established Olympic racquet sport — though precise global figures vary by source and methodology and are not available in the retrieved evidence.
On Olympic Day, none of these sports is present in the official slate.
Meanwhile, the sports that are present — or at least eligible — are the established Olympic disciplines with mature governance structures: badminton, tennis, squash. Of these three, only badminton has built a format and a campaign that truly fits the Let’s Move template.
The result is a structural mismatch. The IOC participation campaign mobilizes where governance is mature. Participation growth is happening where governance is still catching up. On June 23rd, the market trend and the Olympic participation machinery run at least partly in parallel rather than together.
The governance gate
This is no failure of anyone’s intent. It is the logical consequence of how the Olympic movement is structured.
Olympic Day activations flow through International Federations. IFs that are IOC-recognized — with established governance, global membership, and a track record of institutional cooperation — are the natural channels for Let’s Move campaigns. The BWF has this infrastructure and has used it. The ITF has it and has chosen a different calendar. The WSF has it and is currently focused on LA28 qualification.
Padel and pickleball do not yet have it — at least not at the level required to plug into the IOC’s official apparatus. While the pivot from medals to movement (RSI curated) is gaining institutional momentum, the mandate for governing bodies is to broaden the product — to reshape calendars and formats so they invite citizen participation alongside elite competition. But that mandate can only be carried out by bodies that are already inside the tent.
So the logic is not “participant numbers buy a place in the Olympic movement.” It is “federation maturity buys a place in the Olympic movement.” Padel and pickleball have emphatically demonstrated that they do not need the IOC participation campaign in order to grow. But the governance architecture the IOC demands of its partners takes time, political capital, and institutional patience that participation curves alone cannot accelerate.
What badminton got right on Olympic Day
It is worth pausing on the badminton case, because it shows what a racquet sport can do when governance and format align.
AirBadminton was no accident. The BWF designed it specifically as a low-barrier outdoor format — playable on grass, sand, or any flat surface, with a modified shuttlecock developed for outdoor conditions. From the outset it was a participation product rather than a competition product. The result is that when the IOC launched Let’s Move and asked its IF partners for “get active” responses, badminton had an answer ready. The #WhiteCard Day initiative (RSI curated) and the Para Badminton Open Day in Baku (RSI curated) are further evidence of a federation that has systematically built participation infrastructure alongside its elite program.
The lesson for the other racquet sports is not subtle: the right time to build the participation format is before the campaign asks for it, not after.
The way forward
The structural picture is not static. Squash’s LA28 debut creates a real window. The PSA Foundation’s Squash Summit (RSI curated) and the broader community mobilization ahead of the Olympic debut (as of 2024; more recent data not available) suggest that the squash world understands the opportunity — even if, as Crouin warns, the Olympic platform is a tool that must be actively put to use. The question for squash is whether it can build a low-barrier, outdoor-friendly format — the kind of visible, public court Crouin himself has dreamed of (RSI curated) — in time to make Olympic Day 2028 a genuine participation moment rather than a branding exercise.
For padel, the path runs through the continental games circuit and ultimately through the IOC recognition process. The debut at the 2026 Asian Games and the European Games in Istanbul 2027 (RSI curated) are the waypoints. If padel’s governing bodies can demonstrate the governance maturity the IOC demands, the 2032 Brisbane cycle becomes a realistic target for full inclusion — and with it, access to the Olympic Day infrastructure.
For pickleball, the timeline is longer. The merger of rival international governing bodies (RSI curated) is a necessary precondition, not a sufficient one. The 2032 Games in Australia — where the sport has real grassroots traction — represent the earliest realistic Olympic horizon.
In the meantime, the world’s fastest-growing racquet sports will keep building their participation numbers outside the Olympic Day framework. This is not a catastrophe. Padel and pickleball have emphatically demonstrated that they do not need the IOC participation campaign in order to grow. But it does mean that every June 23rd, the planet’s most powerful sport-activation platform is not amplifying the sports where participation energy is most alive.
The uncomfortable conclusion
Olympic Day is, at its core, a participation machine. It was built to move people — any people, in any direction, toward any sport. The motto “You Can Do This! Let’s Move” is deliberately — almost aggressively — inclusive.
And yet, within racquet sports, it is structurally exclusive. Not by nature, but by architecture. The sports that qualify for the machinery are those with the governance credentials the IOC demands. The sports with the fastest-growing player bases are, for now, outside the gate.
Badminton has cracked the code: build the format first, then plug it into the campaign. Tennis has its own parallel universe. Squash is on the threshold, with LA28 as its ticket in. Padel and pickleball look on from the outside, growing fast enough that they may not need the machinery — but missing it all the same.
The deeper question the industry should be asking is not whether padel and pickleball should be on Olympic Day. They almost certainly should be, by every participation metric. The question is whether the Olympic participation machinery — built on federation maturity and institutional trust — is agile enough to follow the players to where they actually are. Because right now, on June 23rd, the map the IOC is using and the map the players are drawing are not quite the same map.
This article was produced in full by RacqI — Racquet Sports Intelligence. It is the first in a series RacqI will publish on our website, examining the racquet sports ecosystem and the forces reshaping it.
RacqI is an independent, expert-curated intelligence platform for the racquet sports ecosystem: it answers the questions running racquet sports from verified sources, not the open web, and turns them into decision-grade data, benchmarks, and analysis for operators, investors, developers, manufacturers, and public institutions. RacqI RacqI — Racquet Sports Ecosystem Intelligence Platform launches in August/September 2026.
Prompt to Racqi: Olympic Day (June 23): the IOC runs 150+ sport-neutral "Let's Move" participation events worldwide. Map where the five racquet sports — padel, pickleball, tennis, badminton, squash — actually sit inside that machinery, and explain the gap between the sports.
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