Current Affairs

Updates on the Olympics has been sparse for a while now, with the pandemic ruining most of the plans that Japan has been trying to push for in the last year. Amidst the second and third waves of the virus, we now get the news that there will be additional sports being added to the upcoming international competition.

It’s not pole dancing that has made the cut as some may have hoped but instead, breakdancing. Alongside skateboarding, surfing and sport climbing, breakdancers have gotten the Olympic green light for inclusion at the 2024 Paris Games.

The four sports were included as the International Olympic Committee (IOC) executive board met to confirm the Paris 2024 programme.

Skateboarding, sport climbing and surfing have already been added to the programme for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, which will take place in 2021 after being postponed by a year because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Breakdancing, which grew up alongside hip hop in the South Bronx of New York in the 1970s and is officially known in sports terms as ‘breaking’, appeared at the 2018 Youth Olympics in Buenos Aires, in the form of head-to-head ‘battles’.

Russia’s Sergei Chernyshev, competing under the nickname Bumblebee, won the first breakdancing gold medal for boys in that event, while Japan’s Ramu Kawai won the girls’ title.

Paris 2024

Although new sports have been added, there have been many cutbacks due to the new normal created by the pandemic. Even though the Paris Olympics is almost four years away, the organisers are still taking many precautions in advance.

Federations of sports that already have Olympic status were left disappointed in their bid to increase events within their sports as IOC president Thomas Bach said that none of the proposed 41 events would be included in Paris.

While some sports were substituted in some events within their existing event numbers, Bach said medal events had actually gone down from 339 to 329. Bach added that the athletes’ quota for Paris had been fixed at 10,500, including those participating in the four new sports.

 

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That represents a decrease of 600 from the Tokyo Games, while gender equality would be obtained for the first time in Olympic history in Paris.

Source: AFP Relax News