Breaking Into the Paris Olympics

The full event program for the 2024 Paris Olympics has been unveiled, and there's a lot to be excited about.  The biggest reason to get excited is that, for the first time, there will be an equal number of male and female participants.  (In Tokyo, the ratio is expected to be around 51-49 men.)  They achieved this by reducing the number of quota places in some men's events and adding them to women's events or having an equal number of weight classes in some of the combat sports, although there will still be slightly more men's events on the program (150-145 with 22 mixed events).

Another interesting thing about the Paris 2024 program is that they added very few events to existing sports.  Ordinarily, there would be all kinds of changes from one Olympics to the next, but that will only be the case for a handful of sports.  In fact, the biggest changes are the reduction of events in boxing and weightlifting.  Weightlifting has had all sorts of doping problems in recent years, and, as a result, will only have 10 weight classes in Paris (compared to 14 in Tokyo).

World Athletics requested a mixed cross country relay and the women's 50 kilometer walk.  Not only were they both rejected, the men's 50 kilometer walk was removed.  The IOC has been trying to get rid of the race walk for a while, so that's not unsurprising, although, they did tell World Athletics that they can replace it with a mixed-gender event of its choosing.  They have until May to decide what that will be, but have promised it will be a race walk (my guess is a 4x10 km relay using the competitors from the 20 km).

As for the five sports that are being added for the Tokyo Games, three of them will return.  Baseball/softball and karate are out, although you'd have to figure baseball and softball will be back again when LA hosts in 2028 (and 2032 if those Games are in Australia).  Skateboarding and sport climbing look like they're well on their way to becoming permanent additions (sport climbing actually had an event added for both men and women).  Surfing, meanwhile, is set to take place in Tahiti, which isn't exactly close to Paris.

Even more ridiculous than the fact that the surfing competition will be held 10,000 miles away in the South Pacific (they said that they can have a longer distance in order to utilize existing facilities, but this is taking it to a bit of an extreme I think!), is the fourth additional sport that has been approved for the Paris Games--break dancing, or "breaking" as the IOC calls it.  We all saw this coming when it was first proposed and provisionally approved, but it's still kind of mind-blowing that "breaking" will be an Olympic sport in four years.

Two of the IOC's many 21st Century obsessions are mixed events and events that have a "youthful appeal."  That's why 3x3 basketball was added permanently starting in Tokyo.  That's also why skateboarding, sport climbing and surfing were fast-tracked onto the Olympic program, and that's why they seriously considered adding parkour as a discipline of gymnastics.  Enter "breaking," which had a successful debut at the 2018 Youth Olympics that was evidently enough to earn a place at the Grown-ups Table.

It shouldn't be this easy.  And the fact that it is has to be even more frustrating for sports like squash, which been campaigning unsuccessfully for a place for years.  Quite frankly, it's unfair to those sports.  Because if this trend continues, they'll never be added, yet have to keep watching the IOC play with its new, shiny toys that are these "youthful, urban" sports.

When they changed the process for Tokyo and started allowing host cities to add sports for their Olympics only, I didn't like it.  I still don't.  A sport's either an Olympic sport or it's not.  There shouldn't be any of this on-again, off-again crap depending on what people in the host country like.

Remember what it was like when baseball and softball were dropped and they were looking for two sports to replace them?  The process was incredibly cutthroat, with golf and rugby sevens emerging victorious and rejoining the Olympic program in Rio.  No one would argue that golf and rugby don't belong, and their places rightfully look secure moving forward.

Similarly, wrestling was controversially dropped from the Olympics in 2013, only to be reinstated seven moths later when the IOC held a vote on which sport to replace it with.  The original decision was incredibly short-sighted and they realized they made a mistake, so they immediately moved to rectify it.  That was the right thing to do.  Because can you picture the Olympics without wrestling?

Frankly, that's a criterion that should be considered.  And, sorry, but "breaking" doesn't fit the bill.  Do the Olympics feel incomplete without it?  No!  More significantly, will its inclusion feel appropriate or weird?  "Weird" seems more likely.  I could be wrong, but it's not a natural fit.  And you should only be adding sports that ARE a natural fit.

There was nothing wrong with the old process.  Sports were vetted and had to earn their place.  More importantly, they were voted on by the IOC members themselves.  It wasn't left to the whims or preferences of that particular host city or host country.  When IOC members were voting, they were choosing between sports that had lasting power.  They were picking sports that they knew belonged in not just one Olympics, but all future Olympics (like golf and rugby).  And it was more fair.

This isn't just about "breaking" and whether it should be in the Olympics or not.  This is also about karate, which, after years of trying, could end up being an Olympic sport for a grand total of one Games.  Or baseball and softball, which were out for 12 years, only to come back for one before being taken out again (and likely back in for the next two after that).  It's enough to give you whiplash!

I have no idea how the Olympic debut of "breaking" will go.  I could be dead wrong, and the sport could end up being a huge success.  But I'd like to see a vetting process before sports are added.  That way all the doubt would be removed and you'd know the sport belongs.  Because I'll never be sure that "breaking" does.