Why isn't motorsport at the Olympics?

The Olympic Games are a rare time of togetherness for our increasingly polarised planet. Invariably, they see people from the farthest reaches of the globe join togther to criticise the organising and/or hosting of one the most significant logistical exercises undertaken by humankind.

Criticism is often along the same lines regardless of the destination: it’s expensive, its legacy value is questionable, it prioritises funding for obscure sporting venues over social welfare, and you could even catch a nasty disease were you to attend.

But the social value of the Olympics is best left to economic commentators (the Sydney games cost $6.6 billion, more than a century’s worth of Australian Grand Prix hosting contracts, as it happens), so, as a humble observer of all sports, I will pick a different bone with the games: why isn’t motorsport on the bill?

In a year golf returns to the Olympics despite five of the world’s top ten (at the time they withdrew) choosing not to attend, and with the next Olympics set to feature baseball, truly the world’s most international sport, motorsport’s disallowance for the party is all the more questionable.

“The games are about the competition for the athletes, not for equipment,” former International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge said ahead of the 2012 Games, explaining why an Olympics hosted in London, the capital of motorsport heartland, wouldn’t feature a motor race.

On the other hand, any athlete in, say, an Olympic cycling event will be dependent on the efficiency of their bike, which surely renders this argument baseless.

Likewise, any argument based on the team nature of motorsport as opposed to the individuality of many of the Olympics’ other staples is also moot given football is a regular summer sport.

In any case, every major sporting country employs legions of coaches, scientists, and psychologists to extract the maximum performance from their athletes – and that’s before we talk about the efforts of the Russian sporting bodies.

There is no good reason for a motorsport event of some kind not to be admitted into the Olympics as soon as practically possible – and the practical part of implementing a motor race wouldn’t take long at all.

The first task is to find a suitable venue. FIA grade one racing circuits – the only sort that can host a Formula One race – are prohibitively costly to build for a single event, and even upgrading a track with lower credentials can be expensive.

Putting to one side that, as part of hosting the Olympics, a city often builds expensive sporting infrastructure that almost immediately falls into disrepair, for the purposes of this exercise building a Formula One-spec facility for F1 or similar machinery is out of the question.

In the interest of keeping costs down, why not make it a kart race? A smaller facility – permanent, in a Race of Champions-esque stadium, or on existing streets or walkways – would be far easier to establish and be more accessible than any new Tilke-drome.

Karting also has advantages for the cost of competition, given a kart is the cheapest motorsport machine. The IOC could seek a standard kart supplier, and competing nations could be given limited scope to tweak or fine-tune the control kart their liking.

Only the question of the format remains, and this is easily answerable. A heat system that divides competitors into groups of ten or more to qualify and race, with the podium progressing to the next heat and so on until numbers are sufficiently small for a final race, would be easily workable. Alternatively, an aggregate qualifying system according to which the fastest 20 competitors over a certain number of laps qualify for the race would similarly test the skill of the drivers.

A motor racing event could follow similar guidelines to football and allow only juniors to race, or it could be open to any and all of the world’s best racers, no matter their backgrounds.

Who wouldn’t want to watch Great Britain’s Lewis Hamilton compete in a straight karting fight against France’s Sébastien Ogier and Switzerland’s Sébastien Buemi, or any other combination of motorsport greats?

Motorsport in the Olympics is not simply doable, but with Formula One in particular one of the world’s most-watched sports, it should be a priority.

“A thrilling combination of speed, power, endurance, skill, and tactics produces exciting races with close finishes,” is how the Rio 2016 website describes its mountain bike event. “Crashes and mechanical problems only add to the drama.”

Sounds eerily familiar, doesn’t it…

Follow Michael on Twitter @MichaelLamonato