So the International Olympic Committee approved plans for the options sports being offered at the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles. Before getting to those, though, let's take a look at the optional sports for next year in Paris.

Three of them were held over from Tokyo - skateboarding, sport climbing, and surfing.  While I didn't see a lot of any of the competitions in these sports, what I did see varied from underwhelming (skateboarding) to meh (sport climbing) to fine (surfing). If nothing else, keeping surfing allows Paris to run the event in Tahiti,which is pretty cool.

The fourth sport, replacing baseball and softball, is breakdancing. I did see some of this when it was part of the 2018 Summer Youth Olympics, and I can say it was more entertaining to watch than skateboarding. I've come to think of competitive breakdancing as figure skating on cardboard. 

So what's on tap for LA?

Baseball/softball - which still have to travel together as they share an international federation. I'll be interested to see if MLB works out any allowances for its players to participate, though I don't expect they will.

Cricket - the planned venue will seat 10000, which I hope can expand to something much larger if the Indian team makes the gold medal match. The competition will be in a format called T20, which I now have just a little under five years to figure out.

Flag football - the NFL is already hyping this, to the surprise of no one. According to Al Michaels (reading from the NFL's press release during last night's Jags-Saints game, I assume), there are 20 million flag football players in over 100 countries. Who knew?

Lacrosse - which will finally make up for the lack of medal winners named Jaxxon.

Squash - of all the optional sports, this to me feels like it has the best chance of getting promoted to a core sport. It's popular internationally, and as an individual sport adds fewer athletes to the Games than the team sports (though it will require another venue, where you could play lacrosse, flag football, and rugby on the same fields).

All in all it's not a bad lineup, I think. I'd watch all of these.

For those of you looking for surfing, which seems like a no-brainer inclusion in one of the epicenters of surf culture, not to worry. It's now a core sport. What isn't a core sport for LA is boxing, as the IOC no longer recognizes the International Boxing Association as the federation for international amateur boxing. There's apparently a new federation that's trying to get recognized, so you may yet still get to see people punch each other in the face.

And while it's way too early to know what the optional sports will be for the 2032 Games in Brisbane, I could see baseball/softball, cricket, and squash making the list. I could see netball making it, but sadly not Aussie rules football. Unless there's a flag Aussie rules football that I don't know about.