The 2024 Paris Olympics will introduce fresh faces competing in some brand new sports.
Breaking, commonly referred to as break dancing, and kayak cross will make Olympic debuts in Paris this summer. Several sports, including surfing, skateboarding and sport climbing, will make their return to the Summer Games after their 2021 debut in Tokyo.
Paris organizers have made it clear that they are aiming to appeal to younger fans by featuring sports that are “closely associated with youth and reward creativity and athletic performance,” according to the official Paris 2024 website.
Meanwhile, some other sports that were featured at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics and Games past, including baseball, softball and karate, will not make an appearance in Paris this year.
Here’s what to know about the sports coming and going from the Paris 2024 Summer Games.
Breaking will make its Olympic debut in Paris
The sport of breaking will make its Olympic debut in Paris this summer.
The Paris Games will include one men’s and one women’s event “where 16 B-Boys and 16 B-Girls will go face to face in spectacular solo battles,” according to the official Olympics website.
Athletes will improvise to a DJ’s beats using popular breaking movies including windmills, which involve spinning low to the ground, and freezes.
Breaking was introduced at the Youth Olympic Games in Buenos Aires in 2018, but this is the first time the sport will be featured on the main Olympic stage.
Victor Montalvo was the first American to qualify for the breaking competition at the Paris Olympics, according to Team USA.
Breaking is all about "undermining your opponent," he tells TODAY.com.
"It's all about making them look bad, or basically just smoking them — that's what we say," he says. "Each breaker is different, but most of us are well-rounded and most of us have signature moves."
Breakers are judged in five categories, according to the Olympics website: technique, vocabulary, execution, musicality and originality.
The breaking competition is set for Aug. 9-10.
Kayak cross will debut as a new discipline of canoeing competition
Olympics canoeing traditionally has involved two forms of competition: sprint and slalom.
In a sprint race, single or grouped competitors in kayaks or canoes traverse a calm body of water for the fastest time. In the slalom events at Paris, racers compete over an artificial white-water course while navigating through obstacles.
In the slalom category, the Paris 2024 Olympics will see a new style of competition: kayak cross.
Kayak cross involves racing over white water and through obstacles. But instead of only competing against time, the athletes will directly race against each other, according to the Paris Olympics website.
The race starts from a ramp above the water where the competitors wait until the ramp releases. Once it releases, the kayakers take off. Now, each athlete must navigate through a course that includes six gates moving downstream and two gates located upstream.
Missing one of the gates will result in a disqualification.
Kayak cross also requires racers to complete a kayak roll, a 360 degree flip into the water with the boat, then pivoting back fully upright.
The reigning world champion, Joe Clarke of Great Britain, will be competing at the Paris Olympics and is the person to beat, per Reuters.
A traditional slalom event can take more than an hour, meaning it can be "pretty boring" for spectators, Clarke told the outlet. But a kayak cross race can take 45 seconds, he said.
“It’s the head to head element that gets people on the edge of their seats,” Clarke told Reuters. “The feedback is instant, first across the line. You see people have a terrible start but go from fourth to first in an instant. Or first to fourth.”
The men's and women's kayak cross competition is set for Aug. 2-5.
3 recently introduced Olympics sports will return
Surfing
The sports of surfing, skateboarding, and sport climbing — each of which made their Olympic debut at the Tokyo Games — will return for Paris 2024.
In Tokyo, American surfer Carissa Moore took home the first women’s gold for Olympic surfing, while Brazilian athlete Italo Ferreira won gold for the men.
Team Coca-Cola's Tyler Wright of Australia, who provisionally qualified for the Paris Olympics in September 2023 and is preparing to compete, tells TODAY.com that traditionally the best of the best in surfing is determined by the world title, which requires athletes to "to be the best over 10 events."
For the Olympics, however, the competition lasts only four days during a nine-day window. The winner of the competition will be determined in six rounds.
The addition of surfing to the Olympic games has brought "excitement," Wright says, as well as the sense of "we don't want it to change the narrative of what the peak and pinnacle of what our sport is."
Surfing is scored on a scale of 0.1 - 10.0 by five judges.
For viewers tuning in for the first time, prepare to potentially be frustrated.
"It's not just who's the best," Wright says. "We have the ocean. And the ocean is a whole different ballgame ... It'll deeply frustrate an audience, deeply enrage you, because you can be like, 'Oh, that athlete is clearly better at this, and they didn't get an opportunity.' Or, 'That athlete almost made two 10-point rides and they don't go through because of the slightest wave altercations.'"
In short, "the best doesn't always win," Wright says.
"Sometimes the ocean does choose. And a lot of us are OK with that," she adds.
Skateboarding
The skateboarding competition in Paris will include two categories, as it did in Tokyo, park and street.
In park skateboarding, athletes perform tricks in a curved arena similar to what you might see in a skatepark, while in street skateboarding, athletes skate on a road-like course with obstacles such as stairs and handrails.
Four athletes took home gold medals for skateboarding in Tokyo: Australia’s Keegan Palmer (men’s park), Japan’s Yuto Horigome (men’s street), Japan’s Sakura Yosozumi (women’s park) and Japan’s Momiji Nishiya (women’s street).
Skateboarders Gavin Bottger, Tate Carew, Jagger Eaton, Nyjah Huston, Mariah Duran, Paige Heyn, Chris Joslin, Ruby Lilley, Poe Pinson, Tom Schaar, Minna Stess and Bryce Wettstein have qualified to represent the U.S. in Paris, according to the Team USA website.
Sport climbing
Sport climbing, meanwhile, is similar to rock climbing and includes men’s and women’s categories. In Tokyo, Slovenia’s Janja Garnbret won gold for women’s combined sport climbing, while Spain’s Alberto Gines Lopez won the men’s gold.
In 2024, sport climbing will look a little different compared to Tokyo. At the last Olympics, competitors received a combined score for their performances in three disciplines: lead, which involves scaling a wall with ropes; bouldering, climbing a series of walls in as few attempts as possible; and speed, a race up a wall.
"Usually people had two strong disciplines and one weaker," Canadian climber Sean McColl tells TODAY.com.
Now, there are two competitions — a combined lead and bouldering event and a separate speed event.
Speed is "extremely different" from lead and bouldering, he says, comparing it to a 100-meter dash or 50-meter swim. A speed wall stays the same, while a bouldering and lead wall is "constantly changing," with athletes seeing the wall for the first time on the day of competition.
"So the lead and boulder aspects are, I don't really like to say it, but its more of the 'climbing' climbing, whereas speed is a sprint," McColl, who is a member of Team Coca-Cola, says.
Reaching certain parts of the lead and bouldering walls equates to points, with a maximum of 100 possible points for each round. Those scores are combined and ranked to determine the winner.
McColl, 36, competed in Tokyo but did not qualify for Paris. He served as the president of International Federation of Sport Climbing (IFSC) and presented to the International Olympic Committee (IOC) for the inclusion of sport climbing, which was voted on in 2016.
"I was very conscious going through all the efforts of pitching to the IOC, and making the presentations that I would maybe be retired by the time it got to the Olympics," he says.
Karate has been dropped as an Olympic sport
Karate made a historic Olympic debut at the Tokyo Games, but its inclusion was short-lived. The sport will not return for the Paris Olympics, to the confusion of some in the martial arts community.
“What has happened is not that karate has not been included — it has been excluded, which is not the same — on purpose,” Antonio Espinós, president of the World Karate Federation, told the sports website Inside the Games in 2021.
He also called the International Olympic Committee’s process for determining its lineups “opaque.”
“It is a very well-kept secret what are the considerations from the IOC when deciding the Olympic programme, but it should be open and transparent,” he said.
Baseball and softball are also out in 2024 — but they’ll be back
Baseball and softball will not be included in the Paris Olympics, after having made a return in Tokyo.
Baseball is a men’s-only sport at the Olympics, and has been officially featured six times at the Games since 1992. Prior to that, it had been included on-and-off as a demonstration sport at the Olympics since the early 1900s, according to the World Baseball Softball Confederation.
Softball, meanwhile, is a women’s-only sport at the Olympics, and has featured five times since 1996.
Why are baseball and softball out for Paris? The IOC has not shared publicly why these sports did not make the cut this time around.
In the past, Major League Baseball officials have expressed concerns around scheduling conflicts. The Summer Olympics fall during the middle of the MLB season, when the best players can't be spared.
In Tokyo, the top players on MLB rosters were barred from participating in the Olympics, but Japan allowed its professional players to compete, according to the AP.
However, baseball and softball aren’t gone from the Olympics for good; both will return for the Los Angeles 2028 Games.
“The WBSC firmly believes that baseball and softball will help millions of fans engage with the Olympic Games, especially with USA being home to many of the sports’ best players and biggest stars from across the world,” Riccardo Fraccari, president of the World Baseball Softball Confederation, said in a 2023 release.
CORRECTION (July 6, 2024, 5:45 p.m. ET): A previous version of this story misstated that Japan blocked professional baseball players from competing in the Tokyo Olympics. Japan paused its season to allow professional players to compete.
