Skateboarding, Breakdancing Have Been Added As Olympic Sports

12/07/2020 07:05 pm EST

Though the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo was postponed already due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, the International Olympic Committee has already made some announcements about changes to the games that will go into effect for the 2024 Olympics in Paris. Among the developments announced by the IOC include "exactly 50 per cent male and female participation" for the games that year, even more mixed gender events (going up from 18 to 22), a reduction in the overall number of events to 329, and the confirmation of four new sports including: Skateboarding, sport climbing, surfing and breaking (aka breakdancing).

"With this programme, we are making the Olympic Games Paris 2024 fit for the post-corona world," IOC President Thomas Bach said in a statement. "We are further reducing the cost and complexity of hosting the Games. While we will achieve gender equality already at the upcoming Olympic Games Tokyo 2020, we will see for the first time in Olympic history the participation of the exact same number of female athletes as male athletes. There is also a strong focus on youth."

Skateboarding, sport climbing, and surfing will make their Olympics debut for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

Skateboarding will be divided into men's and women's divisions with two disciplines, street and park, available to competitors. According to the official Olympics website, in each round, a skater's best of three 45-second runs count as their final round score. Five judges use a 0-100.00 point scale. The highest and lowest scores for each run are dropped, and the remaining three scores are averaged to two decimal places resulting in the final run score.

Sport climbing will be divided between men's and women's with atheletes competing in three disciplines: bouldering, lead climbing and speed. In lead, athletes attempt to climb as high as possible on a wall measuring more than 15m in height and 6m overhanging within a fixed time. In bouldering, the objective is to overcome the most problems on a climbing route in the least number of attempts on 4.5m-high structures over a set period of time. The ranking is decided by the number of problems overcome.

Surfing, divided into men's and women's, will have athletes perform manoeuvres on a given wave, the totality of which is scored by a panel of five judges based on the difficulty, variety and type of manoeuvres. Surfers are also judged on their power, speed and flow during and between the manoeuvres.

Specific rules and divisions for "Breaking" were not announced with today's press release, but the version that took place during the Youth Olympic Games Buenos Aires 2018 was divided into men's, women's, and mixed-team events.

(H/T EW)

(Cover Photo by Dean Treml/Red Bull via Getty Images)

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