Sport in Mexico Sport in Mexico The most popular sport in Mexico is association football, followed by boxing. However, there are regional variations: for example, baseball is the most popular sport in the northwest and the southeast of the country. Basketball, American football and bull riding (called "") are also popular. Mexico City hosted the 1968 Summer Olympics, the first time that the event was held in Latin America. Since then, the only edition of the Olympic Games held in the region was in 2016, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Mexico first participated at the Olympic Games in 1900 and has sent athletes
Olympic Games of African countries threatened the IOC with a boycott to force them to ban South Africa and Rhodesia, because of their segregationist regimes. New Zealand was also one of the African boycott targets, because its national rugby union team had toured apartheid-ruled South Africa. The IOC conceded in the first two cases, but refused to ban New Zealand on the grounds that rugby was not an Olympic sport. Fulfilling their threat, twenty African countries were joined by Guyana and Iraq in a withdrawal from the Montreal Games, after a few of their athletes had already competed. Taiwan was excluded from