The Olympics are an essential sporting confrontation for athletes and a spectacle for the majority, but also a test for launching new activities likely to expand the profitability possibilities of this new sector of sports leisure.
Those of Paris offer a striking demonstration of this with the confirmation or integration of four activities. To be introduced to the Olympic Games, a discipline must be practiced by men in at least fifty countries and three continents, and by women in at least thirty-five countries on three continents. And with each edition, sports can be deleted (baseball and softball in 2012), reintroduced (golf and rugby in 2016) or integrated by the organizing country. The 2021 Tokyo Olympics saw the reintroduction of baseball and softball and the arrival of karate, rock climbing, skateboarding and surfing. The last three are confirmed in Paris and add breakdancing.
To contribute to the market consolidation of the sports leisure sector, these activities must meet certain conditions.
Or be the vector for the sale of products linked to the activity such as skateboarding, which is mainly practiced by young amateurs, buyers of equipment and clothing.
Or be the means of expression for shows, which is increasingly the case with breakdancing.
The case of climbing is even more revealing of the role that a sporting specialty can play in contributing to the capitalist development of the leisure sector. Introduced in Kyoto, it included three types of tests to be practiced by everyone and result in the awarding of a single gold medal overall per gender.
These three disciplines were speed, consisting of climbing as quickly as possible a fifteen meter wall inclined at 5° beyond the vertical, the block where it is a question of succeeding without rope four routes with a maximum height of 4.5 m and the difficulty where you have to climb a route of more than 15m well beyond the vertical. But this competition format mixed cabbages and carrots, the speed being very different from the other two and little practiced by bouldering and difficulty specialists.
For climbers, the best solution that made sense in relation to their practice would have been to award a gold medal per type of event. The IOC did not accept this solution, but for Paris, speed will result in one medal, with bouldering and difficulty combined for another, a compromise welcomed by climbers.
We can indeed consider that the Paris Olympics will be better in line with the reality of the practice, speed climbing being in fact very little practiced in the world.
So why maintain such a marginal test? Because it is spectacular, journalists and those who don’t climb will tell you. And it’s true that it’s impressive to see the agility with which the climbers “swallow” the 15 meters of the wall. Impressive but repetitive and I don’t know a single climber who stays more than five minutes watching a speed competition.
On the other hand, bouldering and difficulty are not only the traditional forms of practice but above all, on artificial structures like those where competitions take place, they lead to practice in private rooms, the number of which is exploding throughout the world.
Climbing at the Olympics thus offers a perfect illustration of what is expected of this type of competition. Non-practitioners will watch the speed climbing on television, which is spectacularly assured by the commentators, and the two other specialties will interest practitioners supplying the future clientele of the private rooms. It thus fulfills the two conditions to be a source of profitability in the leisure sector, that of entertainment for non-practitioners and the commodification of the activity for practitioners.
2024-02-12 23:03:52
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