The International Olympic Committee used Thursday’s Executive Board meeting in Lausanne to launch a review focused on reducing the scale of the Brisbane 2032 Summer Olympics. The assessment will rely on discipline-specific criteria, with a formal vote expected in June.
While no sports were cut during the meeting, IOC President Kirsty Coventry indicated that decisions on the Brisbane 2032 programme are likely to be made between late this year and early next year. She also made it clear that changes are expected, stating: “I do think the size will change” and “we don’t expect to see 36 sports.” Los Angeles 2028 is currently set to feature a record 36 sports, compared with 26 at London 2012.
A major part of the reform will involve evaluating Olympic events at the discipline level rather than judging entire sports. The working group, led by Karl Stoss, plans to assess disciplines based on factors such as venues, field-of-play requirements, and logistical demands. IOC Sports Director Pierre Ducrey explained that a discipline refers to one or more events within a sport that require either a dedicated competition venue or significant changes to a shared venue, usually involving a distinct group of athletes. Under this framework, Paris 2024 includes 47 disciplines, while Milano Cortina 2026 features 20.
The reasoning has a sporting, operational and economic dimension, as Ducrey linked the method to the need to “try and understand how we can decomplexify and reduce the size of the Games by using units which are very closely connected with one of the elements that creates the most challenges when it comes to delivering the Games, and that’s the venue”. Coventry broadened the diagnosis to the entire impact chain by acknowledging that this is where “additional costs and complexities” arise, along with potentially more dispersed Games that make the experience more difficult for national Olympic committees, broadcasters, athletes and the IOC itself.
The president presented the shift as a recovery of strategic authority over the Olympic product and put it especially clearly when she said that “This is our product. We should regain that control. And we should look after it. And we should figure out how we want potentially new sports, innovative sports and disciplines to come onto the programme”. The idea connects with the limits of the recent expansionary phase, which Coventry summed up by saying that “we can’t continue to just get bigger, bigger, bigger, bigger, bigger”.
Brisbane will be heard, but the IOC does not want to hand the organising committee a decision before first setting out a clear framework, which is why Coventry stressed that organising committees are involved “to a point” and that the organisation does not intend to “just pass a hot potato onto Brisbane”. The organisers will have limited room for manoeuvre in a decision that will directly affect venues in Queensland. The Brisbane 2032 contract does not require it to stage Games on the scale of Los Angeles 2028, and Andrew Liveris, president of the organising committee, supports keeping the limit at 10,500 athletes, while LA28 could reach 13,000 participants.
