{"id":66644,"date":"2025-08-14T03:20:11","date_gmt":"2025-08-14T03:20:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/66644\/"},"modified":"2025-08-14T03:20:11","modified_gmt":"2025-08-14T03:20:11","slug":"kevin-sheedy-leading-charge-for-afl-exhibition-game-at-2032-brisbane-olympic-games","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/66644\/","title":{"rendered":"Kevin Sheedy leading charge for AFL exhibition game at 2032 Brisbane Olympic Games"},"content":{"rendered":"

Essendon<\/a> legend Kevin Sheedy is spearheading the push for the AFL<\/a> to feature at the 2032 Olympic<\/a> Games.<\/p>\n

It wouldn’t technically be an Olympic debut for the native code, however, given Australian rules was played in an exhibition format during the 1956 Melbourne Games.<\/p>\n

Sheedy, the mastermind behind the AFL’s Dreamtime and Anzac Day games, believes Brisbane 2032 is the perfect stage to feature the code yet again. <\/p>\n

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\"Australian<\/p>\n

Australian rules at the 1956 Olympics.\u00a0Nine<\/p>\n

In 1956, an amateur team played against a combined VFL\/VFA outfit after the Closing Ceremony.<\/p>\n

This time around, Sheedy sees it as a chance to essentially play an All-Star game featuring that season’s All-Australian team. <\/p>\n

Currently, the All-Australian squad of 44 is simply symbolic of the season that has been played. They don’t actually play together or against anyone; but Sheedy believes an exhibition game featuring those players would be a perfect addition to the Brisbane Games. <\/p>\n

“I’d love to see AFL represented at the 2032 Olympics,” Sheedy said at the Sports Australia Hall of Fame morning tea on Thursday.<\/p>\n

“This is the only way to do it. We have 50 great players and they never play each other they just get an (All-Australian) coat and a feed and buzz off. That’s just not good enough.”<\/p>\n

And Sheedy has already found support in Australian Olympic hero Steve Hooker, who won gold in the pole vault in the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games.<\/p>\n

“It is our most iconic sport. It is our most truly Australian sport. I’d love to see an exhibition game at the Olympics, that would be great,” Hooker said at the same event.<\/p>\n

\"Former<\/p>\n

Former Essendon coach-turned-director, Kevin Sheedy\u00a0Getty<\/p>\n

AFL boss Andrew Dillon certainly didn’t back away from the idea either.<\/p>\n

“We would love the opportunity to showcase the best sport in the country on the biggest sporting stage in the world,” Dillon told 9News Melbourne. <\/p>\n

Sheedy, already inducted as a Legend in the Australian football Hall of Fame, played 251 games for Richmond across the 1960s and 1970s, before coaching 634 games at Essendon between 1981 and 2007, and then a further 44 games as the inaugural coach of GWS.<\/p>\n

He won three premierships as a player and four as a coach.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Essendon legend Kevin Sheedy is spearheading the push for the AFL to feature at the 2032 Olympic Games.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":66645,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[560],"tags":[638,64,63,55,639,85],"class_list":["post-66644","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-afl","tag-afl","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-australian-football-league","tag-australianfootballleague","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66644","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66644"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66644\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/66645"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66644"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66644"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66644"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}