The Asian Games: Larger than the Olympics and with an array of regional and global sports

The Asian Games are an attention grabber. For starters, they involve more participants than the Summer Olympics. Organisers say more than 12,000 will be entered when the opening ceremony takes place Saturday in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou. This is more than the 10,500 expected for next year’s Paris Olympics.

The giant numbers are partly due to the staggering array of events with many regional specialties, sports, and games you won’t find in the Olympics. And there’s also cricket, which appears headed to the Olympics as soon as 2028 in Los Angeles, and certainly for 2032 in Brisbane, Australia.

And there’s squash, which has tried several times for Olympic recognition.

The regional fare includes dragon boat racing, sepaktakraw - sometimes called "kick volleyball" - wushu, a Chinese martial art, and kabaddi, a popular contact sport on the Indian subcontinent. There is also the non-Olympic martial art of ju-jitsu, and kurash, a form of wrestling popular in central Asia.

To this, add a long list of what organisers call “mind sports” from bridge to chess to xiangqi (Chinese chess) to e-sports.

Of course, there are the old standbys seen in every Olympics like track and field, swimming, or volleyball - and the usual grandiose opening and closing ceremonies. Nine sports will offer qualification spots for the Olympics - archery, artistic swimming, boxing, breaking, hockey, modern pentathlon, sailing, tennis, and water polo.

However, most of the 481 events offer a chance for smaller delegations to win medals, which is often impossible at the Olympics.

China won almost 300 overall medals at the last Asian Games in Indonesia in 2018. At the bottom of the table, Syria and Nepal won a lone medal each. Bhutan and Bangladesh were among