These are the new sports activities we may see at the 2024 Summer Olympics, according to a proposal that host city Paris submitted to the International Olympic Committee ultimate week. This request falls in keeping with the IOC’s purpose of creating the Games extra young people-centered, gender-balanced, and more urban, Kit McConnell, IOC sports director, tells SELF.
We chatted with McConnell to examine extra approximately this shift in direction for the Olympics, the information of Paris’s idea, exactly how new sports activities are introduced to the Olympics, and different highlights in the works for the 2024 Games.
First, here’s a little context on how new sports are added 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 absolutely had to take a recreation out of the program,” explains McConnell.
To permit more inclusion in the Games, the IOC introduced in 2014 several modifications to the shape and layout of the Olympics that would begin in 2020. The biggest update is disposing of the maximum variety of sports activities in line with Games and replacing it with a maximum wide variety of common athletes and most events. This allows the power to introduce new sports without reducing current ones, explains McConnell.
Then, on the subject of virtually choosing the 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 they have got an international federation identified using the IOC, which facilitates the IOC to build suitable qualification systems. Beyond that, it’s virtually up to the city.
Tokyo proposed five new sports—baseball/softball and karate (both of which can be very famous in Japan), plus skateboarding, mountaineering, and surfing—and all had been 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 really enticing,” says McConnell. From there, Paris considered which sports could in shape into that imaginative and prescient, he explains. Roughly 15 special sports activities, such as squash, billiard sports activities, and chess, submitted proposals to Paris with the hopes of creating the metropolis’s brief list. Paris’s final recommendation, says McConnell, changed into based totally on what they felt satisfactory match their imagination and prescient of the games, and occurred to include 3 sports already on the list for Tokyo.
Now that Paris has submitted its thought, 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 of 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 4 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 with 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, of 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.
In fact, 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. Obviously, 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 a ‘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 put into effect at the 2024 Games to create an extra related occasion.
The first: mass participation occasions that permit spectators to no longer simply watch the games but actively engage with them, explains McConnell, like inviting lots of spectators from around the arena to race at the Olympic marathon route rapidly after the Olympians address it themselves. On pinnacle of that, Paris hopes to offer immersive, electronic versions of Olympic events, like biking and crusing, that permit humans around the sector to sincerely partake in Olympic activities themselves, he explains.
With all of those changes, the primary intention is to make the Olympics greater inclusive and engaging for each person, says McConnell. So irrespective of which sports cut, we’re going to have masses to rejoice and cheer for in Tokyo 2020, Beijing 2022, Paris 2024, and beyond.