Breakdancing And Surfing Join A Scaled-Back 2024 Olympics

The International Olympics Committee has approved plans for the 2024 Olympic games in Paris. The event has been scaled down to fit a “post-corona world,” but will include full gender equality along with some new arrivals: skateboarding, sport climbing, surfing and breakdancing.

The details come from a Dec. 7 press release, which touts the plans for the Paris Olympics as flexible and geared toward youth audiences. The new events and full gender parity were the main focus: although next year’s Tokyo Olympics will get close with 48.8% female athletes, Paris will be the first time the number has been exactly the same.

“With this program, we are making the Olympic Games Paris 2024 fit for the post-corona world, reducing the cost and complexity of hosting the Games,” said committee president Thomas Bach. “There is also a strong focus on youth.”

The inclusion of breakdancing is one hallmark of the focus on new generations. The sport was buoyed by strong interest at the 2018 Youth Olympic Games in Buenos Aires.

More generally the release talks about an “expanded urban sport concept” to “showcase youth-focused events that are inclusive, engaging and can be practiced outside conventional arenas.”

The sheer size of the event, however, has been reduced. Almost 600 fewer athletes will head to Paris than Tokyo, to a total of 10,500. The committee has spread out the reductions, but larger sports that can bear the loss will face greater cuts.

The final number of events in 2024 will be 329, ten less than in Tokyo. The biggest hits came to the boxing and weightlifting communities, which saw a reduction due to falling faith in the sports’ international governing bodies and, in the case of weightlifting, ongoing doping scandals.