Breaking, sport climbing, surfing, skateboarding confirmed as additional sports for Paris 2024
Gender equality with 50 per cent female participation expected for Paris Games, up from 48.8 per cent in Tokyo.
Breaking, sport climbing, surfing and skateboarding have been confirmed as additional sports for the Paris 2024 Olympic Games by the IOC Executive Board.
The IOC EB also confirmed the athlete quotas for the full event programme for the Games, which will see for the first time an equal number of male and female athletes taking part at a Games. Female participation will increase to 50 per cent from 48.8 per cent at Tokyo 2020.
Of the four additional sports, breaking will make its full senior Olympic debut; the other three sports are all on the Tokyo 2020 programme.
"With the sport programme, we are making the Olympic Games Paris 2024 fit for the post-coronavirus world," IOC President Thomas Bach said.
When the sports were first announced in February 2019, the head of the Paris 2024 organising committee Tony Estanguet said the new sports would make the Olympics more 'more urban' and 'more artistic'.
Breaking was a hit at Buenos Aires 2018, where it was included at the Youth Olympic Games for the first time.
Russia's Sergei Chernyshev, competing under the b-boy name Bumblebee, won gold in the boys' event in Argentina, while Japan's Kawai Ramu (b-girl Ram) won the girls' title.
Gender equality
To aid in the quest for full gender equality, the Paris 2024 event programme will see an increase in the number of mixed-gender events, from 18 at Tokyo to 22.
"We will see for the first time in Olympic history the participation of the exact same number of female athletes as male athletes," President Bach said.
Three sports – athletics, boxing, and cycling – will achieve full gender equality for the first time at a Games. In the case of athletics, the men's 50 km race walk has been removed from the programme, with a new mixed-gender event to replace it.
Twenty-eight of the 32 sports in Paris will be fully gender-balanced.
