Field hockey pushes new format toward Olympic goal
As Olympic sports activities goal new and extra dynamic youth-focused codecs, area hockey is making its transfer towards a primary World Cup for a five-a-side model and someday becoming a member of the Summer time Video games.
The Hockey5s occasion this weekend within the Worldwide Olympic Committee’s residence metropolis of Lausanne, Switzerland, will launch senior tournaments for women and men within the shorter format.
Hockey5s is already performed at Youth Olympics however has been resisted by some nations who dominate the normal 11-a-side format and have feared being changed by the IOC, and even dropped totally.
“That was the most important menace to them,” mentioned Worldwide Hockey Federation (FIH) chief government Thierry Weil, who sees a way forward for including, not taking away, from the Olympic program.
“If we’re intelligent we will enhance the variety of medal occasions” with each codecs included, Weil instructed the Related Press in a current interview.
Basketball is a mannequin for the Olympic path area hockey desires to take. On the Tokyo Olympics final yr, the 3-on-3 avenue model of basketball debuted because the IOC pushed to advertise city occasions.
Whereas the US swept the gold medals in conventional males’s and girls’s basketball, its males didn’t qualify for the 3-on-3 event that was received by Latvia. Mongolia took half within the ladies’s 3-on-3 occasion that the U.S. did win.
In area hockey, the 12-nation Olympic males’s and girls’s tournaments sometimes contain the identical pool of established groups, Weil famous.
He cited Austria and Chile among the many FIH’s 141 members that might thrive in Hockey5s. It is designed to be simpler and cheaper to develop than the 11-a-side sport, which have to be performed on high-quality turf and grass fields.
“It is a actually good sport,” Weil mentioned of 11-a-side hockey, “it is an athletic sport with good guidelines nevertheless it’s an elite sport. The funding you want makes it unattainable to do (for a lot of nations).”
Hockey5s is designed to be performed on college yards, tennis courts and parking tons. The 20-minute video games, as an alternative of 60, and perimeter boards to maintain the ball in play goal to create sooner, higher-scoring video games. The 2-day Lausanne occasion may have music as a backdrop to video games.
“We have to make it cool for the youthful technology,” mentioned Weil, a former advertising director at FIFA.
India has despatched sides to the five-team lineups in every of the boys’s and girls’s competitions in Lausanne.
A standard hockey energy, India is predicted to bid to host the 2036 Olympics and is a possible supporter for including Hockey5s.
The 2032 Olympics is in Brisbane and Australia took males’s hockey silver in Tokyo, the place the boys’s and girls’s tournaments included greater than 400 athletes taking part in over 14 days..
Having fewer 11-a-side groups taking part in a shorter Olympic event would create area for Hockey5s within the FIH’s quota of athletes and venue time on the video games, Weil recommended.
After IOC officers see the brief format this weekend, a future check for Hockey5s is in January 2024 when Oman hosts an inaugural World Cup.
