IOC Sports Director Kit McConnell talks new Olympic events, evolving sports program

The first quarter of 2025 will be particularly significant for future Olympics, both Summer and Winter.

Feb. 6 marks the one-year-out date from the Opening Ceremony for the 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Games, which for the 14th consecutive Winter Games will be the largest ever by number of medal events (116).

Also in early 2025, the competition program for the 2028 Los Angeles Games is expected to be finalized. That includes the total number of medal events and the number of athlete spots per sport.

For the 2028 LA Games, new sports were added last year: flag football, baseball, softball, cricket, lacrosse and squash.

The program for Milan Cortina has been set since 2022.

Ski mountaineering, often called skimo, was added after a proposal to the IOC by Italian organizers. In skimo, athletes race up and down a course, spending part of it on skis and part of it on foot going up steps (with their skis attached to their back).

It will be the first sport to make its Winter Olympic medal event debut since luge in 1964. Other events and disciplines within existing sports have been added more recently.

IOC Sports Director Kit McConnell said the ski mountaineering proposal was put through the same criteria as previous changes to the sports program.

“Is it bringing in new audiences? Does it have the best athletes? Is it fitting in a cost-effective way into the overall Games?” McConnell said. “Here, we looked at ski mountaineering, hugely popular, particularly in a participation level around the Alps through France, Switzerland, Italy, Germany, the countries around Central-Western Europe. So, a huge sport in Italy with good chances of medals for the Italians.”

It also helped that competition can be held at an existing venue. It will be in Bormio, a longtime Alpine skiing World Cup stop that’s near the Swiss border.

Plus, the sport’s international governing body, the International Ski Mountaineering Federation (ISMF), has been recognized by the IOC since 2016.

The Milan Cortina Games will also have additional events within existing sports. An emphasis was placed on gender equality with women’s doubles luge and a second individual women’s ski jumping event among those added.

The other new events are men’s and women’s dual moguls and a mixed-gender team event in skeleton. In Alpine skiing, the men’s and women’s individual combined races have been replaced by men’s and women’s team combined races.

McConnell called it “the most innovative and progressive Olympic Winter Games program we’ve ever had.”

Milan Cortina is projected to have the highest female participation rate in Winter Games history (47%), two years after Paris marked the first Summer Games to offer an equal number of athlete quota spots between men and women.

In deciding which new events to add, the IOC, in discussions with each sport federation, used a similar process as it did for the ski mountaineering proposal.

“What’s the value it brings in terms of potentially new audiences, more popular broadcast product, greater ticket sales, this type of thing, equally making sure that it’s cost-effective,” McConnell said. “With those new events, they were invariably using an existing field of play, be it from the ski jumping through to the moguls, for example, so they weren’t adding additional complexities to the hosts. Did they exist outside the Games in a credible way? So, really, on a sport integrity perspective, yes, they were all at World Championship, World Cup level. And would we have the best athletes competing? Yes, we could construct the competition schedules in a way that the best athletes that were already there could compete in these events as well. So they all added value without adding too much demand on the athletes and also adding a huge value to the organizing committee.”

The IOC has already had talks with the International Ice Hockey Federation regarding 3×3 hockey’s bid for Olympic inclusion, which wouldn’t happen until 2030 at the earliest.

McConnell noted that the event was held at the last two Youth Olympics (Lausanne 2020, Gangwon 2024).

“It was used at that (Youth Olympic) stage to really help new countries in ice hockey participate in an Olympic event,” McConnell said. “I know they’re moving forward with their planning for other international (3×3 hockey) events, including World Championship level events. We can see the way that they’ve drawn from the success of things like 3×3 basketball in the Olympic Games with smaller countries, non-traditional basketball medal winners in the 5×5 format, excelling at 3×3. Similar with beach volleyball — the alternative, newer forms of traditional team sports, if you like, in the Summer Games — and allowing the opportunity for some of the smaller hockey countries to potentially have a pathway towards the Olympic Games as well and build hockey around the world in this way.”

McConnell said the IOC is “deep into dialogue” with international sports federations and LA organizers about possible new events within existing sports for the next Summer Games.

The final 2028 Olympic event program is expected to be announced around late March.

“We will be using Paris as a reference to build from, obviously,” McConnell said. “A lot of federations have come forward with proposals for new events, different formats, and this is natural. Four years in any of these sports, we see the evolution of different events. We see new events come into their own World Championships and so on.”