Possible 18 New Events Added

Some might call it politics, but regardless of your view it’s great to hear that the organizing committee for the Toyko 2020 games have decided it will propose in total 18 new events across five sports for its Olympic Games.

The sports that will be pumped are baseball and softball, karate, skateboarding, sport climbing, and surfing. The IOC will make a final decision at a session in August 2016.

All of these sports applied for Olympic inclusion or rather their International Federation applied and they were among eight (8) federations out of the 26 that initially wanted in.

This time it will be three that will miss out and the three are Bowling, squash, and Wushu, so might try later on to get reinstated.

Tokyo 2020 made their proposal in alignment with the IOC’s Agenda 2020 which is turning to an ‘event-based program’ over just adding and subtracting sports.

This is why Tokyo 2020 could pick and choose events within sports:

Men’s Baseball, Women’s Softball (last played ay Beijing 2008)
Karate: Kata (W/M), Kumite (W/M)
Skateboarding: Street (W/M), Park (W/M)
Sports Climbing: Bouldering, Lead and Speed Combined (W/M)
Surfing: Shortboard (W/M)

How many are at Rio in 2016?

The only tricky bit is according to the proposal, 474 athletes would be added to the Games in 18 events. While the IOC seems more flexible with events and sports, they did set a cap of approximately 10,500 athletes and 310 events.

At London 2012 attending saw a total of 10,568 Athletes and 302 medal events and at the present time some are not sure how the additions would be reconciled or added.

The most recent sport added to the summer Olympics was wrestling back in September 2013 after it was previously dropped. Before that, golf and rugby were voted in for Rio 2016 and Tokyo 2020 by the IOC in 2009.