Skateboarding Added To the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020!

The decision on August 3, 2016, by the 129th International Olympic Committee (IOC) in Rio de Janeiro, was the most comprehensive change to the Olympic sports program in modern history.

Plans call for staging skateboarding and rock climbing competitions in urban settings. This marks a historical change in an attempt to bring Olympic Games to a new generation and represents the trend of urbanization of sport.

The August vote was the culmination of a two-year process that began with the unanimous approval of the IOC’s strategic roadmap in 2014. The Organising Committees gained the flexibility to propose new sports in an attempt to put even more focus on innovation and youth in the Olympics.

Tokyo 2020, the first Organising Committee able to benefit from the change, submitted its proposal to the IOC in September 2015 for the five new sports.

IOC President Thomas Bach stated publically that “We want to take the sport to the youth. With the many options that young people have, we cannot expect any more that they will come automatically to us. We have to go to them. Tokyo 2020’s balanced proposal fulfills all of the goals of the Olympic Agenda 2020 recommendation that allowed it. Taken together, the five sports are an innovative combination of established and emerging, youth-focused events that are popular in Japan and will add to the legacy of the Tokyo Games.”

Yoshiro Mori, Tokyo 2020 President, commented, “The inclusion of the package of new sports will afford young athletes the chance of a lifetime to realise their dreams of competing in the Olympic Games – the world’s greatest sporting stage – and inspire them to achieve their best, both in sport and in life.”

The IOC considered many factors when evaluating the proposal, including the legacy value of adding them to the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020, the youth appeal of the sports and the impact on gender equality.