Brisbane 2032: Shrink Mode at the IOC – and Squash is Back on the Bubble

What the IOC’s new course means for squash’s Olympic dream – a critical assessment

Squash has barely secured its long-awaited Olympic debut at Los Angeles 2028, and already its place in Brisbane 2032 is in serious doubt. At the IOC Executive Board meeting in Lausanne on 8 May 2026, IOC President Kirsty Coventry left no room for interpretation: the era of expansion is over. The Los Angeles 2028 record of 36 sports will not be repeated. As Coventry told the press conference, reported by Inside the Games: “I do think the size will change” and “we don’t expect to see 36 sports.” Her summary line said the rest: “we can’t continue to just get bigger, bigger, bigger, bigger, bigger” (Inside the Games, 9 May 2026).

Most worrying for squash supporters: in the same article, Inside the Games explicitly names squash – alongside flag football and lacrosse – as one of the LA28 newcomers unlikely to make it onto the Brisbane programme.

The Timeline – Briefly

The Extraordinary IOC Session on 25 June 2026 will not decide the Brisbane programme. It will only sign off the new discipline-level evaluation criteria drafted by the working group under Karl Stoss. The actual sports programme decision is scheduled between Q4 2026 and the first months of 2027 (Inside the Games, 9 May 2026; IOC, 19 September 2025). World Squash President Zena Wooldridge has publicly assumed mid-2026 (DT Next, 9 December 2025) – which after Lausanne now looks optimistic. June is not judgment day. June is the day the rules of the cull are set.

The IOC Logic Was Already Squeezing Squash at LA28

The fact that squash is suddenly under threat for Brisbane should not surprise anyone who watched the LA28 process closely. The same IOC cost-and-complexity logic was already eating into squash’s footprint a year ago.

In April 2025 the IOC quietly slashed squash’s LA28 athlete quota from the originally planned 32 players per gender down to just 16 per gender – a 50 percent cut announced as part of the Executive Board’s final LA28 programme confirmation. That makes squash one of the smallest standalone sports at the Games, on par with trampolining and smaller than even BMX Freestyle (which is officially a sub-discipline of cycling) (Racquet Sports Institute).

That decision was a clear signal even before Coventry took over. The IOC had not actually fallen in love with squash – it had granted it a modest courtesy slot. The reduction to a 16-draw also exposed the structural weakness: a stand-alone glass court venue serving only 32 athletes is precisely the kind of single-use infrastructure that the IOC, in its Lausanne press conference of May 2026, defined as the main cost driver in Olympic delivery. IOC Sport Director Pierre Ducrey was explicit that the new methodology will assess sports at the level of “events… that require their own competition space or a significant modification of a shared space” (Inside the Games, 9 May 2026).

Squash ticks every box on the wrong side of that definition: own venue, own surface, no shared use, small athlete numbers. The same logic that halved the LA28 draws is now the explicit framework against which Brisbane will be judged. From a pure cost-per-medal-event perspective, squash is uniquely exposed.

Has the WSF Done Enough? A Critical Look

This is where the squash community needs an honest conversation – because measured against what other federations are doing, the World Squash Federation’s Brisbane campaign looks remarkably thin.

Here is what squash has actually done since being confirmed for LA28 in October 2023:

• One meeting with the Brisbane 2032 organising committee on 14 March 2025, attended by WSF President Zena Wooldridge, Squash Australia President Matt Schmidt, CEO Rob Donaghue, PSA COO Lee Beachill and Sarah Fitz-Gerald, with OCOG CEO Cindy Hook and Sport Director Brendan Keane. Both sides described it as “positive and constructive” (World Squash, 14 March 2025).

• Upgrading the Australian Open in Brisbane to PSA Gold status in 2025, played on a glass court at South Bank as a kind of soft demonstration event.

• A status upgrade at the IOC to “Associate Olympic Sport” with an annual grant rising from US$32,000 to US$77,000 (World Squash Annual Report 2024/2025).

• Branding the Comcast Squash Center at Universal Studios for LA28 as a media showcase.

• Publicly stating an ambition to reach core-sport status by 2036 (Tournament of Champions, 2026).

Now compare this with what the actual competition has been doing.

Netball has run an industrial-scale public campaign. World Netball and Netball Australia launched the “Back the Bid: It’s Netball’s Time” global pledge, gathering more than 100,000 signatures by early 2026 (SEN, 23 March 2026), with mobilisation through the Netball World Youth Cup (World Netball, 28 September 2025). World Netball commissioned a formal feasibility study, completed Phase One of a structured campaign including market research and extensive stakeholder lobbying, and runs parallel engagement with the IOC, AOC and the OCOG (Ministry of Sport, 12 May 2025). Netball Australia chair Liz Ellis personally re-pitched the bid in August 2025 and addressed the IOC’s gender-parity concern by highlighting growth in male participation (Wikipedia: 2032 Summer Olympics).

Cricket has the ICC President Jay Shah personally attending IOC Sessions to lobby for Brisbane retention, with the financial and political weight of the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) and a guaranteed Indian broadcast market behind him.

Flag football has the National Football League’s full corporate machine behind it, including a dedicated Australia–New Zealand operation pitching Brisbane.

Lawn bowls, karate, lacrosse, baseball/softball, breakdancing, flying disc, touch football, lifesaving sports – all eleven of squash’s competitors have visible, structured campaigns with clearly defined targets (Wikipedia: 2032 Summer Olympics).

By comparison, the WSF strategy reads as: one meeting, one upgraded tournament, one technology partnership, and a press release. There is no global petition. There is no commissioned feasibility study made public. There is no Indian-cricket-style political heavyweight personally attending IOC Sessions on squash’s behalf. There is no Australian public-facing campaign anywhere near netball’s scale, despite Australia being the host country with a deep squash heritage – Geoff Hunt, Heather McKay, Sarah Fitz-Gerald – that should be a free goal for the lobbying team.

The structural problem behind this is uncomfortable but worth saying. The WSF’s argument is essentially “we are cheap, fast and innovative.” That was the same pitch that won LA28 – when the IOC was still in expansion mode. Coventry’s IOC isn’t shopping for cheap and innovative; it is shopping for fewer venues and shared use. A pitch that worked in 2023 will not necessarily work in 2026, and yet the WSF appears to have largely repeated it without significant escalation.

There is a credible argument that squash has been quietly executing a sophisticated insider strategy and that loud public campaigns can backfire. But that argument is hard to sustain when the IOC has already shown – with the 32-to-16 LA28 quota cut – that the insider relationship is not delivering protection. If insider work is the plan, the plan is not working.

Brisbane 2032 - Outlook

Squash is not condemned. The frustrating thing is that it is sitting on a set of arguments that – properly weaponised – should be among the strongest of any LA28 newcomer. The WSF simply isn’t using them.

The racquet sports participation boom. Globally, racquet sports are the single fastest-growing category in mass participation. Pickleball has gone from a backyard game to the fastest-growing sport in the United States. Padel has exploded across Europe, the Middle East and Latin America, with court numbers multiplying year on year. Tennis facility operators report waiting lists. This is a structural shift in how people play sport – away from team-and-pitch and towards racquet-and-court – and squash is the original member of that family. An IOC committee that genuinely wants relevance with new audiences should be paying close attention to where actual participation is moving. Squash should be telling that story loudly. It isn’t.

Squash is an urban sport. A standard court has a footprint of 62,4 m² and slots into a converted warehouse, a basement, the corner of an office tower or a community centre. Compare that with cricket pitches, baseball diamonds, lacrosse fields or the dispersed venues required for canoe slalom or mountain biking – the very disciplines IOC Sport Director Pierre Ducrey flagged in Lausanne as the cost-and-complexity problem. Squash is built for dense cities. It is the racquet-sport version of skateboarding or 3x3 basketball, which the IOC already loves precisely because they are urban, compact and youth-coded. The WSF has not made that framing central – it should be the headline.

The political shift towards participation as preventive health. This is the argument the WSF should be hammering above all others. Governments across the developed world are moving sport policy out of the elite-medal silo and into the public-health budget. Australia’s national sport strategy explicitly links physical activity to reductions in healthcare expenditure. The UK, EU member states and US public-health agencies are converging on the same logic: every dollar spent on participation infrastructure saves multiples in chronic-disease cost. Squash is, by any objective measure, one of the most cardiovascularly intense mainstream sports on the planet – frequently cited in Forbes and elsewhere as the single healthiest sport per minute played. It is intensely social, low-injury relative to contact sports, and accessible across the lifespan. In a Coventry-era IOC that talks about Olympic relevance and sustainability, squash should be positioning itself as the poster sport for the participation-for-health-cost-reduction agenda. None of that is currently in the public-facing campaign.

Heritage and federation reach. On top of all that, squash has a 122-nation federation footprint, an existing professional tour with broadcast infrastructure, and – uniquely among the contenders – a deep Australian heritage that should make the home-nation pitch a free goal: Geoff Hunt, Heather McKay, Sarah Fitz-Gerald.

The arguments are extraordinary. The campaign is not.

If squash is dropped from Brisbane 2032, the consequences are not just symbolic. As Wooldridge herself has noted, federations only receive Olympic Solidarity funding once they have featured in two consecutive Games (Inside the Games, 22 October 2023; European Squash Federation, 26 July 2024). LA28 alone, without Brisbane, would mean a single one-off appearance, no structural funding boost, and a substantially weakened case for any future inclusion bid.

Between now and the IOC Session in late 2026, the WSF needs to do considerably more than meet, brand and tweet. The arguments are sitting there, fully loaded – the racquet sports participation wave, the urban-sport credentials, the public-health-cost case. The other federations have set the bar with petitions, presidents personally lobbying at IOC Sessions, corporate machinery and structured global campaigns. Right now squash is not clearing it. Not because it can’t – but because, on the evidence so far, it isn’t really trying.