These are the new sports activities we may see at the 2024 Summer Olympics, according to a proposal that the host city, Paris, submitted to the International Olympic Committee last week. Kit McConnell, IOC sports director, tells SELF that this request falls in keeping with the IOC’s purpose of creating the Games to be extra young people-centered, gender-balanced, and urban.
We chatted with McConnell to learn more about this shift in direction for the Olympics, Paris’s idea, exactly how new sports activities are introduced to the Olympics, and other highlights in the works for the 2024 Games.
First, here’s some context for adding new sports to the Olympics.
Starting with the 2020 Games in Tokyo, the IOC made major adjustments to the format and framework of the Olympics to permit the inclusion of more sports activities. Before the 2020 Tokyo Games, each edition of the Olympic Games had been capped at 28 sports, a listing determined completely by the IOC. This intended that “to bring a new game in, we had to take a recreation out of the program,” explains McConnell.
To permit more inclusion in the Games, the IOC introduced several modifications to the shape and layout of the Olympics that would begin in 2020 in 2014. The biggest update is disposing of the maximum variety of sports activities in line with the Games and replacing them with a wide variety of common athletes and most events. McConnell explains that this allows the power to introduce new sports without reducing current ones.
Then, on the subject of virtually choosing brand new sports activities, the IOC determined that they’d depend on input from the host metropolis in preference to doing this selection solo. The goal is to encompass sports activities that suit the host metropolis’s vision for the Games and sports activities that can be mainly popular inside the host usa. The simplest requirement for proposed sports activities, says McConnell, is that an international federation be identified using the IOC, which facilitates the IOC in building suitable qualification systems. Beyond that, it’s virtually up to the city.
Tokyo proposed five new sports—baseball/softball and karate (both very famous in Japan), skateboarding, mountaineering, and surfing—and all were permitted.
Paris “came up with a vision in their edition of the Games in 2024 that is truely targeted on reaching out to young humans, on having an Olympic Games in urban surroundings, on gender equality, and on being enticing,” says McConnell. From there, he explains that Paris considered which sports could be shaped into that imaginative and prescient. Roughly 15 special sports activities, such as squash, billiard sports, and chess, submitted proposals to Paristo and created the metropolis’s brief list. Paris’s final recommendation, says McConnell, changed based totally on what they felt was satisfactory to match their imagination and prescient of the games and occurred to include three sports already on the list for Tokyo.
Now that Paris has submitted its thoughts, the IOC will examine the four sports and, after several layers of evaluation, will announce its very last decision in December 2020.
As stated, 3 of the four proposed sports activities—skateboarding, surfing, and hiking—are already on the software for Tokyo; because of this, the IOC already has strong expertise in the elements that would make the sports good Olympic contenders, like their global recognition, how competitions are run, venue requirements, and so forth. Break dancing, though no longer on the listing for Tokyo, changed into a part of the 2018 Teens Olympic Games in Buenos Aires, so it’s additionally already well-known to the IOC, explains McConnell.
That stated, the IOC will nevertheless carefully examine the four sports for Paris 2024, thinking about the variety of athletes who take part in the sports around the arena, the wide variety of human beings watching and engaging in the sports activities, the venues required to host the sports, and extra, says McConnell. After several layers of inner evaluation, the IOC will announce its decision in June on which sports may be provisionally included in Paris. They’ll then wait until December 2020 to announce the final event list for 2024, explains McConnell, to deliver them the risk to assess how well the brand new sports activities are acquired on the Tokyo Games.
Surprisingly, there may be no such element as a “permanent” Olympic recreation.
“The proposals for Paris are unique to the Paris 2024 Games,” says McConnell. He explains that Los Angeles, host of the 2028 Summer Games, could have the identical opportunity to advise new sports that replicate the metropolis’s vision for the Games and what’s popular in the United States. Said imaginative and prescient may not encompass Paris’s identical alternatives.
None of the contemporary Olympic sports activities have assured a spot in future Games. That’s because the IOC continuously re-evaluates the lineup. “We undergo a manner of officially approving the inclusion of each sport for each version of the Games,” explains McConnell. The inclusion of core sports, like swimming, isn’t positioned into query at each game; he says however, technically, “there’s no such aspect as an ‘everlasting sport.'”Other modifications we might also see on the 2024 Games include mass participation occasions and immersive tech stories.
When filing its proposed new sports activities, Paris also announced several additional updates it hopes to implement at the 2024 Games to create an extra-related occasion.
The first is mass participation occasions that permit spectators to no longer watch the games but actively engage with them, explains McConnell, inviting many spectators around the arena to race at the Olympic marathon route rapidly after the Olympians address it themselves. On the pinnacle of that, he explains that Paris hopes to offer immersive, electronic versions of Olympic events, like biking and crusing, that permit humans around the sector to partake in Olympic activities themselves sincerely.
McConnell says the primary intention of all those changes is to make the Olympics more inclusive and engaging for each person. So, irrespective of which sports cut, we will have masses to rejoice and cheer for in Tokyo 2020, Beijing 2022, Paris 2024, and beyond.