Olympic Games
The Olympic Games programme consists of 35 sports, 30 disciplines and 408 events. For example, wrestling is a Summer Olympic sport, comprising two disciplines: Greco-Roman and Freestyle. It is further broken down into fourteen events for men and four events for women, each representing a different weight class. The Summer Olympics programme includes 26 sports, while the Winter Olympics programme features 15 sports. Athletics, swimming, fencing, and artistic gymnastics are the only summer sports that have never been absent from the Olympic programme. Cross-country skiing, figure skating, ice hockey, Nordic combined, ski jumping, and speed skating have been featured at every Winter Olympics programme since its inception in 1924. Current Olympic sports, like badminton, basketball, and volleyball, first appeared on the programme as demonstration sports, and were later promoted to full Olympic sports. Some sports that were featured in earlier Games were later dropped from the programme.
Netball and the Olympic Movement
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 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.