The International Olympic Committee (IOC) definitively validated this Monday during the meeting of the executive committee the addition of four additional sports during the 2024 Games in Paris: skateboarding, breaking, climbing and surfing. The integration of these four disciplines is not a surprise, as the organizing committee for the 2024 Games (Cojo) has been pushing in this direction for several months. The competition venues had already been chosen.
Surfing will take place on the mythical wave of Teahupoo in Tahiti, skateboarding and breaking in the urban park of Place de la Concorde, while climbing has finally been moved to Le Bourget, in Seine-Saint-Denis to compensate for the departure especially swimming and volleyball.
The IOC also validated the entry of 8 new events: two in extreme slalom in canoe, three mixed races in sailing, one mixed race in athletics (replacing the 50 km walk which is disappearing) and two weight categories in women’s boxing.
“Revolutionary Games”
However, these new events and disciplines will not impact the number of participants. For the sake of savings, the IOC intends to limit the number of participants to 10,500. And great progress for 2024: the Olympic committee has announced that there will be as many women as men, knowing that for the Games in Tokyo next summer, the female representation will be 48.8%. Parity in 2024 is all the more a blink of an eye since it was in 1900, during the first Olympic Games in Paris, that women made their appearance on the program of events. They were at the time 22 (men, 975) and represented only 2% of the participants!
“With the sports program unveiled by the IOC, Paris 2024 consolidates the markers of its identity,” said Tony Estanguet, President of Cojo. Major societal advance with, for the first time, a number of female athletes equivalent to that of men; daring and youth with new sports and new spectacular events; sobriety with a reduction in the total number of athletes and events on the program. More than ever, the conditions are met to make Paris 2024 a revolutionary Games. “
