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Break dance became an official Olympic sport on Monday. The International Olympic Committee’s quest for urban events to attract a younger audience saw street dance battles officially added to the medal event schedule at the 2024 Paris Games.
Skateboarding, sport climbing and surfing were also confirmed for Paris by the IOC executive board.
Those three sports will make their Olympic debuts at the Tokyo Games that were postponed a year due to the coronavirus pandemic to open on July 23, 2021.
Eitan Abramovich / AFP / Getty
In addition to the additions, the IOC made subtractions: the list of 329 medal events in Paris is 10 less than in Tokyo, including four lost to weightlifting, and the athlete quota in 2024 of 10,500 is about 600 less than the next year.
Two sports with struggling governing bodies – boxing and weightlifting – saw the biggest cuts in the number of athletes they can have in Paris.
Weightlifting should have 120 athletes in Paris, which is less than half their total at the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Games. The sport could be abandoned altogether due to its historic doping problems and IOC concerns about pace. and the depth of reform in the International Weightlifting Federation.
The IOC emphasized its future priorities for Paris, and beyond the Los Angeles 2028 Games, stating that it will achieve a long-term goal of equal participation of male and female athletes, and more urbanized events.
Since organizers in Paris need time to prepare their project, the IOC maintained its pre-pandemic calendar to confirm the 2024 sports lineup this month, even before some are tested in Tokyo.
Breakdancing will be called break in the Olympics, as it was in the 1970s by the pioneers of hip-hop in the United States.
Eitan Abramovich / AFP / Getty
It was proposed by the Paris organizers almost two years ago after positive tests at the 2018 Youth Olympic Games in Buenos Aires. The rupture passed new stages of approval in 2019 from separate decisions by the IOC board and the full membership.
In Paris, the break has become a prestigious central location, joining sport climbing and 3v3 basketball at the Place de le Concorde.
The surfing will take place more than 15,000 kilometers (9,000 miles) away in the Pacific Ocean off the beaches of Tahiti, as already agreed by the IOC in March.
Among the 28 sports established at the Summer Games, a total of 41 additional events were proposed for Monday’s meeting.
All augmentations, including ocean rowing and parkour, were rejected, and changes were allowed only at the expense of existing events being removed. Two extreme canoe slalom events will replace the canoe sprint events, and the men’s 50-kilometer walking race will be replaced by a mixed team event.
The IOC said that “limiting the total number of events is a key element in slowing the growth of the Olympic program, as well as the additional costs.”
In other IOC business, Bach confirmed that the more than 11,000 competitors at the Tokyo Olympics should not remain in the official athletes’ village during all games, to help limit the risk of COVID-19 infections.
Teams will be informed of the policy that athletes must arrive at their accommodation no more than five days before the start of their competition and have left two days after it ends.
Boxing is on the Tokyo agenda even though its governing body, known as AIBA, was terminated by the IOC last year.
A seven-candidate presidential election will take place this weekend and Bach said AIBA was “well aware” of the Olympic body’s concerns about some of the contenders, which it did not identify.
The IOC was skeptical last year about an offer to settle AIBA’s $ 16 million debts, if the sport’s Olympic status was preserved, by Russian boxing official Umar Kremlev, who is now a candidate.
The AIBA election is scheduled as a panel of judges from the Court of Arbitration for Sport is preparing a verdict in a landmark case in Russia’s doping saga that could see widespread penalties imposed on the nation’s sports.
When asked whether Russian election campaigns are appropriate in Olympic circles at this time, Bach said: “It is up to everyone to make their own judgment on such candidacies.”
