Golf and rugby sevens have been shortlisted for inclusion at the 2016 Olympic Games, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) said Thursday. The two were selected from seven candidate sports by the IOC's executive board at a meeting in Berlin and a final vote on their inclusion will be held at the IOC session in Copenhagen in October. The other five – squash, softball, baseball, roller sports and karate – will need to wait another four years before attempting to make it on to the Games program. “In the end, the decision came down to which two would add the most value,” IOC President Jacques Rogge told reporters. “Golf and rugby scored high on all 33 criteria,” Rogge said, adding this was still a proposal and it needed to be validated. Rugby, which in its traditional 15-a-side format featured at the Olympics four times at the start of the 20th century, had always been the front runner. After failing in their previous bid to get into the 2012 Games the sport's powerbrokers mounted an aggressive and effective campaign, with International Rugby Board (IRB) president Bernard Lapasset making it the priority of his first term of office. His intention was to make it a truly global sport, ‘reaching out' as he termed it, and as IRB chief executive Mike Miller pointed out the Sevens format is ideal for television as it is ‘fast and furious' and also has the habit of producing upsets. Golf, which also appeared briefly at the Games in the early 1900s, had attracted a certain amount of scepticism even from golf lovers, in that it was too elitist and also several members hardly espouse the IOC value of sexual equality as they belong to male-only golf clubs. Also as Australian golfer Geoff Ogilvy declared at one point “we are not members of a team we are individuals and we decide where we play'. 2016 is also a Ryder Cup year. Several potential Olympic contenders who may be on the cusp of qualifying for either the American or European teams could well prefer to play in another tournament so they can garner enough points to make their respective Ryder Cup teams. “This is the biggest growth opportunity for golf,” Peter Dawson, chief executive of the Royal and Ancient (R&A) and one of the bid leaders, however, said. “Golf has a lot to offer to the Olympic movement.”
