A dip in novelty: the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris will see male and female swimmers compete together in synchronized swimming events for the first time, according to the announcement made by the International Olympic Committee (IOC), Thursday, December 22.
Each team of eight members will be able to count “up to a maximum of two men”, details the instance. In total, ten teams will be competing at the Paris Olympics.
Artistic swimming, known as synchronized swimming until 2017, has been part of the Olympics since 1984, but it will be the first time that men can compete on a team at the Olympics. However, they had already participated, since 2015, in the world swimming championships.
18 mixed events in Tokyo
Several Olympic disciplines are now open to mixed teams. At the previous Summer Olympics, last year in Tokyo, French judokas and judokas won the gold medal for the first time as a team. Without however fighting against the opposite sex.
There are also mixed relays in swimming (4×400 meters) and athletics (4×100 meters medley), as well as women-men doubles in racket sports (badminton, tennis, table tennis). A total of 18 out of 339 events were mixed in Tokyo, according to an IOC tally. “A sign of innovation and greater gender diversity”, brags the committee.
More than diversity, the IOC has set itself a goal of parity among athletes. In 2021 in Tokyo, 48% of them were women, a record proportion since the beginning of the modern era of the Games, in Athens in 1896.
Few sports where women and men compete
However, the vast majority of events remain single-sex. And others are still the preserve of men, such as Greco-Roman wrestling and baseball at the Summer Olympics. Apart from the Olympic events, very few individual sports allow men and women to compete. Individual shooting events (apart from duos) remain gendered.
If the differences in performance between men and women are put forward to explain this reluctance, some rare disciplines however mix the sexes. This is particularly the case for horse riding (the only sport on the program of the Olympic Games involving men and women). Or motor sports, even if women are very rarely present at the highest level.
Korfbal, the only mixed and equal discipline
A single collective sport allows the same number of women and men to compete together in a situation of diversity and parity: korfbal. In this discipline close to basketball, two teams of eight players, four women and four men, try to score in the opponents’ basket. Players each defend against a person of the same sex.
The authorities of this sport, imagined in the Netherlands in 1902, hope to see korfball on the list of Olympic sports in the next decade. In the meantime, breakdance will make its debut in Paris in 2024, as well as“a mixed test” athletics: a 35 kilometer running relay. With the ever-present objective of achieving perfect parity, for the first time in the history of the Games.
