The International Olympic Committee (IOC) voted unanimously on Thursday to include skateboarding in the 2020 Summer Games in Tokyo.
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And just eight years after it banished baseball and softball from the Olympic games, the committee announced today that beginning in 2020, softball and baseball would once again become Olympic sports.
Major League Baseball owners and the players’ association would need to cut games from their 162-game schedule to accommodate players competing in the Olympics.
“This will constitute a new chapter in the illustrious history of the Olympic Games”, Yoshiro Mori, president of the Tokyo 2020 Organizing Committee, was quoted by local media as telling the IOC assembly.
The 2016 Rio Olympic Games aren’t even officially underway yet and we’re already ready for them to be over.
Tokyo 2020 is the first committee to use the changes set forth in this agenda.
The addition of five new sports is, in no small measure, due to the Olympic Agenda 2020, which is “the strategic roadmap for the future of the Olympic movement”. This event has been in previous Olympics with its last appearance in the 2008 Beijing Games. Now there are about 25,000 active baseball and softball players in upwards of 300 clubs under the DBV umbrella. We do not wish to be part of it and will not support the Olympics if skateboarding is added as an Olympic sport.
‘With the many options that young people have, we can not expect any more that they will come automatically to us. The two sports have worked together since then to get reinstated, and on Wednesday, it was made official.
All of the new sporting events to be held in Tokyo gained entry to the Olympics with a unanimous decision by the IOC.
The global federations of baseball and softball, which in 2008 suffered the humiliation of being excluded from the 2012 and 2016 Games, are now returning to the Olympics after mounting an active campaign to recover their Olympic status. Wednesdays approval was for the Tokyo Games only. There will be an addition of 18 events associated with the new sports.
This looks to be a move that will help reinvigorate the Olympics and help market them towards a younger audience. It must prove it’s a sport that truly captures the Olympic spirit.
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Another skateboarder, a 12-year-old Tyson Zane, said finally they will make it a real sport and could represent America.
