Netball has never been played at the Summer Olympics, but its federation has been recognized by the International Olympic Committee (IOC), since 1995 after a twenty-year period of lobbying. The netball community sees netball's absence at the Olympic Games as a hindrance to the global growth of the game, depriving it of media attention and funding. The IOC requires a high geographical scope for inclusion in the Olympics (played by men in 75 countries and by women in 40), but netball is mostly played in Commonwealth countries. When the IOC recognized netball's federation, it opened up sources of funds that the global netball community had not been able to access before, including the (IOC), national Olympic committees and sports organisations, and state and federal governments.
Women's sport at the Olympics
According to Dyer in 1982, exclusion of netball from the Summer Olympics is part of the historical pattern of the slow growth and gradual acceptance of women's sports. Women first competed in the 1900 Summer Olympics in only three sports: tennis, croquet and golf. Women's basketball has been played in the Summer Olympics since 1976. That year, rowing and handball were also opened to women. Women's cycling was excluded for many years despite having world championships organised by 1958. Field hockey, a sport included for men as early as 1908, was not open to competition by women until 1980. By the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona, there were 159 medal events for men, but only 86 for women, and 12 for both men and women, and as late as 1996, 26 countries sent no women to the Olympics. There were still sports that excluded women at the 2000 Summer Olympics, such as boxing, wrestling and baseball. At the 2012 Summer Olympics, every country but Nauru did, and both men and women competed in 34 sports.
In 2018, the IOC adopted 25 recommendations from its Commission on Women in Sport. These recommendations seek to establish equal participation between men and women at the Olympic Games by implementing the same venue, equipment, competition rules and uniforms for both genders in all Olympic sports rather than adding women-only sports. At the 2012 Olympics, there were two sports for women only: synchronized swimming and rhythmic gymnastics. That netball is also played mostly by women is seen as a drawback. Netball does allow for mixed teams, but the Olympics did not include mixed sex team sports. Rugby sevens and golf, primarily played by men, were chosen for inclusion in the 2016 Summer Olympics for both sexes ahead of netball.
The issue of male over-representation in terms of total number of sports and athletes is structural. In the United Kingdom, for example, more male athletes than female ones receive financial support. Sports officials often rationalise this uneven distribution by claiming that there are more opportunities for men to win at the highest level than there are for women. The importance of being part of the Summer Olympics is illustrated by softball, and the benefits the sport derived from its inclusion. This included additional media coverage, especially during Olympic years. Olympic recognition plays an important part in getting sponsorship for local competitions around the world and providing new opportunities for female netball players.
Olympic recognition of the INF
Efforts to gain Olympic recognition started in 1967, at the time when the International Netball Federation (INF) was founded as the "International Federation of Netball Associations". The Jamaican and Singaporean delegations present at the meeting suggested the newly created organisation become affiliated with the World Olympic Sports Council and try to get netball included on the Olympic programme. Opinions were initially split inside the newly formed organisation as to whether this was a goal worth striving for, but ultimately it was decided to work towards Olympic recognition. The federation's first application was rejected because it referred to the sport as women's basketball and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) said there could not be two different sports with the same name on the Olympic programme. This rejection was a driving factor for changing the name of the sport. There was tremendous resistance in Australia and New Zealand to this. IFNA made "major concessions" to both countries to persuade them to change the name of their national federations. In 1965, the IOC criteria required a sport must be played in at least 11 nations and the international body represented the sport must have at least 27 national organisations affiliated with it.