(Beijing) The International Olympic Committee on Thursday consolidated the Olympic status of climbing, surfing and skateboarding, already present in the summer of 2021 in Tokyo and planned for Paris-2024, by integrating them into the initial program of the Olympic Games-2028 to the detriment of boxing, weightlifting and modern pentathlon.
Posted yesterday at 11:26 p.m.
As planned last December by the body’s executive board, these three “youth-oriented” sports are included in the list of 28 Olympic sports guaranteed to be represented in Los Angeles in 2028, even before the organizers propose disciplines. additional.
“Los Angeles 2028 has always been about bringing more freshness, youthful energy and creativity to the Olympic and Paralympic movement,” said Casey Wasserman, the boss of the organizing committee, praising “iconic sports of the West Coast “.
In Tokyo, climbing, surfing and skateboarding had taken their first Olympic steps under the more precarious status of “additional sports” submitted by the host city and deprived of the windfall of television rights. This will again be the case in Paris, just like for breakdance which is not yet in question in Los Angeles.
As the Olympic body imposes a quota of 10,500 participants in the Olympic Games to “limit the costs and the complexity” of its summer high mass, the 139and session meeting in Beijing on the eve of the opening of the Winter Games (February 4-20) removes boxing, weightlifting and modern pentathlon from the list of 28 for the time being.
But these three sports, Olympic for more than a century, will be able to return to the Los Angeles program at the 2023 IOC session, if they give enough pledges of reform, recalled Thursday the president of the Olympic program commission. , the Austrian Karl Stoss.
The International Amateur Boxing Association (AIBA), deprived in 2019 of the organization of its own Olympic tournament for multiple failures in management and arbitration, has been led for more than a year by the Russian Umar Kremlev, who insists on wanting to restore his credibility.
Weightlifting, still under the threat of Olympic radiation from 2024 due to a cascade of doping and corruption scandals, arouses “serious concerns” regularly expressed by the IOC, and remains under surveillance.
As for the modern pentathlon, it is undergoing a complete overhaul due to the Saint Boy affair, the name of the horse that a German rider and her trainer had hit during the Tokyo Games, and must now find what discipline to replace riding with. , fencing, shooting, running and swimming completing the event.