The International Olympic Committee (IOC) approved five new sports events for the Tokyo Summer Olympics in 2020.
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Gary Ream, president of the Skateboard Federation, is grateful to the Tokyo 2020 Skateboarding Commission and the Federation Internationale de Roller Sports (FIRS), as they collaborated to make including Skateboarding in the 2020 Olympics a success.
International Olympic Committee members voted unanimously to accept the five-sport package, which also has karate and sport climbing.
“We want to take sport to the youth“, Thomas Bach, IOC president, said in the release. We have to go to them.
With changes to the IOC rules for Olympic events, 5 new sporting competitions will be heading to the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games next time around. On Thursday the International Olympic Committee announced this wonderful news.
According to Hendrix, when it comes to judging the sport at the Olympics, skateboarding should be similar to snowboarding and figure skating, where athletes are judged on the difficulty of their routines along with their style and execution. “Nations competing for the Olympic gold medal in baseball and softball, in Japan, will best showcase the nature and spirit of our global sport – and it will be the most covered and most exciting worldwide baseball/softball tournaments in history”. It became an official Olympic sport in 1996 and remained as such for the following three Olympics. The Tokyo Games organizers did their best to include such a wonderful activity into the OG 2020 menu.
Details about both surfing and skateboarding as Olympic competitions are not yet clear.
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Baseball is hugely popular in Japan, and the Japanese Olympic Softball Team won the last gold medal in 2008. In 1992, it was officially added to the program. Karate will have 80 athletes competing in men’s and women’s Kumite and Kata events, while surfing will have two shortboard events for 40 competitors. “Surfing continues to grow and seeing it reach the Olympic level is really exciting”, said John John Florence, current WSL #2. The other sports were never included before. These sports have been well established on the worldwide stage for a long, long time.
