Breakdancing to debut at 2024 Paris Games
GENEVA — Breakdancing became an official Olympic sport on Monday.
The International Olympic Committee’s pursuit of urban events to lure a younger audience saw street dance battles officially added to the medal events program at the 2024 Paris Games.
Also confirmed for Paris by the IOC executive board were skateboarding, sport climbing and surfing.
Those three sports will make their Olympic debuts at the Tokyo Games, which were postponed to 2021 because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Breakdancing will be called breaking at the Olympics, as it was in the 1970s by hip-hop pioneers in the United States. In Paris, breaking has been given a prestige downtown venue, joining sport climbing and 3on-3 basketball at Place de le Concorde.
Surfing will be held more than 9,000 miles away in the Pacific Ocean off the beaches of Tahiti, as the IOC already agreed in March.
Alongside the additions, the IOC made subtractions: The slate of 329 medal events in Paris is 10 fewer than in Tokyo and the athlete quota in 2024 of 10,500 is around 600 less than next year.
Two sports with troubled governing bodies — boxing and weightlifting — saw the biggest cuts to the number of athletes they can have in Paris.
Weightlifting should have 120 athletes in Paris, which is less than half of its total at the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Games. The sport could be dropped entirely due to its historic doping problems and IOC concerns over the pace and depth of reform at the International Weightlifting Federation.