Olympics: Breakdancing gets official Games status, to debut at Paris in 2024

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 one year because of the coronavirus pandemic. The Tokyo Games are slated to open July 23.

The IOC also 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 about 600 fewer 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 the IOC’s concerns over the pace and depth of reform at the International Weightlifting Federation.

The IOC stressed its future priorities for Paris, and beyond to the 2028 Los Angeles Games, by claiming it will hit a long-term target of equal participation by men and women athletes, and more urbanized events.

With Paris organizers needing time to prepare their project, the IOC kept to its pre-pandemic schedule to confirm the 2024 sports lineup this month even before some are tested in Tokyo.

Breakdancing will be called breaking at the Olympics, as it was in the 1970s by hip-hop pioneers in the United States.

It was proposed by Paris organizers almost two years ago after positive trials at the 2018 Youth Olympics in Buenos Aires. Breaking passed further stages of approval in 2019 from separate decisions by the IOC board and full membership.

In Paris, breaking has been given a prestige downtown venue, joining sport climbing and 3-on-3 basketball at Place de le Concorde.

Surfing will be held more than 15,000 kilometres away in the Pacific Ocean off the beaches of Tahiti, as the IOC already agreed in March.

Among the 28 established Summer Games sports, a total of 41 additional events were proposed to Monday’s meeting.

All increases were rejected, including ocean rowing and parkour, and changes were allowed only at the expense of existing events being dropped. Two extreme canoe slalom events will replace canoe sprint events, and the men’s 50-kilometre race walk will be replaced by a mixed gender team event.