It was to be expected. The IOC Executive Board, meeting for the last time of the year on Monday December 7 in virtual mode, unceremoniously decided on the thick file of the Paris 2024 Games program. Its members were invited to make choices. They complied with the zeal of the top of the class.
The result will make history. For the first time since the creation of the Olympic Games, the program of events in Paris in 2024 will respect gender parity to the nearest decimal point. Cool. The IOC did not have to upset a balance already almost achieved for the Tokyo Games, where the proportion of women will reach 48,8%. But the Parisian organizers will still be able to boast of being the first to display a scale with two perfectly aligned scales.
As soon as the news was announced, the COJO did not hesitate to point out that the Paris Games in 1900 had been the first to open up to the participation of women. At the time there were only 22, for a total of 975 male athletes, an insignificant, but nonetheless historic, proportion of 2% of competitors.
Parity, therefore. She is the big winner of a meeting of the IOC Executive Board impatiently awaited by the Olympic movement, primarily the international federations. There were more than twenty of them filling out their files as if they were a list of gifts to send to Santa Claus. More than twenty to submit to Thomas Bach and his close guard requests to add new tests and/or disciplines.
In the end, the verdict of the IOC Executive Board delighted a handful, but above all it caused its share of disappointment. This was to be expected, the Olympic body having warned applicants that there would be no question of increasing the number of athletes (10), nor the number of medal events, and even less that of sites competition.
The winners, first. There are four, the four additional sports proposed by the COJO Paris 2024. Climbing, skateboarding and surfing confirm a status already won for the Tokyo Games. Breakdancing is making its debut. It was written, or almost.
Between them, the additional sports will “weigh” 248 athletes at the Paris 2024 Games. Unlike the Tokyo Games, where they were outside quotas, these 248 new entrants will have to slip below the 10.500 athlete mark. The calculation is simple: the IOC sports management, led by Kit McConnell, had to cut back to stay on track.
The result can be seen in the numbers. At the Tokyo Games next year, the program will include 339 medal events. Three years later, he will count ten fewer (329) at the Paris 2024 Games.
With such an equation, the international federations wishing to gain a greater place in 2024 have been at a loss. The IOC Executive Board rejected, among other things, requests from athletics to include cross-country, from rowing to add sea rowing, from gymnastics to give parkour an Olympic veneer, etc.
Certainly, novelty will not be absent from the program for the Paris 2024 Games. But the most motivated international federations had to sacrifice events to win others. The harsh law of the world after.
Athletics wins an event. It will be mixed and will replace the 50 km walk. World Athletics will have to roll up its sleeves and propose an innovative concept next spring while staying on point. Prognosis: a mixed walking event.
A new weight category for women will replace another, for men, in the boxing program. Parity, again and again. But boxing, whose international body (AIBA) remains in the crosshairs of the IOC pending the presidential election on December 12, figures prominently among the big losers of the week. It loses 34 athletes between Tokyo 2020 (286) and Paris 2024 (252).
Canoe-kayak won its case by having extreme slalom accepted, for men and women, but it had to sacrifice two line sprint events for this.
Sailing is getting an Olympic facelift. She's used to it. Three new events – mixed kitesurfing, mixed 470, and possibly ocean racing – are entering the Games, while three others (men's and women's 470, men's Finn) are leaving. The fate of mixed offshore racing will be sealed after a series of additional studies on costs, safety and athlete security, the conclusions of which will be communicated on May 31.
A new shooting event, mixed team skeet, will replace mixed team trap.
Another big loser: weightlifting. It was expected. As in the case of boxing, athletes can blame their leaders, singled out by the IOC as primarily responsible for the weight loss treatment imposed on the discipline by the executive board. At the 2024 Paris Games, weightlifting will lose four medal events (two per gender) and no less than 76 athletes. There were 260 at the Rio 2016 Games, there will be 196 next year in Tokyo. Three years later, there will only be 120 weightlifters left to see Paris.
