Tokyo in 2020 will have some entertaining new events, like skateboarding, three-on-three hoops and mixed-gender relays, while some others will be pruned.
Three-on-three basketball? Yes, please. Mixed-gender relays in the pool and on the track? Just tell me when to be there.
The International Olympic Committee announced big changes to the Olympic sports menu for the 2020 Tokyo Games on Friday, and it’s not too early to get excited about some of them. There will be new sports, like karate, and new events, like basketball played three against three, with one hoop — kind of like playground ball with Olympic medals at stake, but most likely without chain-link nets.
The new events will guarantee that the Games in Japan won’ t be anything like your parents’ Olympics. Unless, of course, your parents are into skateboarding and sport climbing and surfing. Those sports were added to the program for the Tokyo Games last year.
For the I. O. C. to make this happen is one step short of extraordinary. Somehow, Thomas Bach, the I. O. C. president, and his stodgy cronies have succeeded in creating a new look for the old Olympics. Now the Games sound both fresh and fun. Not competing-in-the-nude fresh, the way the Olympics did things in the very old days, and not simply the regular kind of fun that comes from watching the best athletes in the world compete.
Fresh and fun in a way that may make younger fans want to tune in.
Now there will be mixed-gender team events in archery, and in judo. There will be a 4-x-400-meter mixed relay in track and field, in which some of the world’s fastest men may run head-to-head against some of the world’s fastest women, and a mixed medley in swimming, which will offer the same in the water.
Imagine what a mixed swimming relay would have been like at the 2016 Rio Games. Michael Phelps and Katie Ledecky in the same event? It’s safe to assume a few people might have tuned in to watch that, perhaps just to see if they could finish, towel off, dress and eat dinner before the second-place team touched the wall.
But there are more subtle, yet more meaningful, changes, too. In Tokyo, for the first time, four more Olympic sports — canoeing, rowing, shooting and weight lifting — will have the same number of events for women as they do for men. That means equal numbers of medals for men and women. Equality. It’s a nice concept, finally backed by some I. O. C. follow-through.
Yet for all the positive change, and for all the sports and athletes who were winners this past week, there were some losers, too. No need to shed a tear for them.
Track and field will lose 105 athlete slots, and men’s weight lifting will lose an entire weight class. In all, places for 64 weight lifters were cut, part of a series of bookkeeping adjustments that will make room for the new events while still shrinking the overall field of athletes.
It was probably appropriate those were the sports hit hardest in this I. O. C. overhaul, though. The losses for weight lifting, especially, make sense. In recent years, so many weight lifters have surrendered their medals after failed doping tests that you had to wonder if it didn’ t make sense to hand them out with prepaid return envelopes.
Here’s just one pitiful example: In the men’s 94-kilogram class at the 2012 London Games, Poland’s Tomasz Zielinski finished ninth. A disappointment, to be sure, but Zielinski was eventually awarded the bronze medal after six of the lifters ahead of him failed drug tests.
Wonderful story, right? Not so much. Zielinski, who obviously didn’ t win a medal for his ability to learn from other’s mistakes, was kicked out of the 2016 Rio Games when one of his own tests came back positive.
Oops.
The persistent black eyes had left Olympic officials with little choice but to act to clean up weight lifting and track, or at least to impose consequences for two international sports federations that had repeatedly failed to police their own. Let’s hope that other rogue sports are next in line, and that countries that do the same face the same fate as Russia, which saw its track and field team barred from Rio after a massive doping scandal.
For now, Bach has warned the International Weightlifting Federation to get its antidoping act together by December, or the I. O. C. might kick the entire sport out of the 2024 Olympics. As it is, it will lose only a few spots in Tokyo.
Maybe the I. W. F. can use that free afternoon to publish a new record book. In the retesting of drug samples from the 2008 and 2012 Olympics, more than four dozen weight lifters were found to have tested positive.
Bach called weight lifting’s punishment in Friday’s reordering of the Games “a strong signal” to the sport. Good for him. Standing up to cheaters, and meting out real punishment, is common sense. If one sport’s athletes can’ t follow the rules, other athletes from other sports should get a chance.
Weight lifting has squandered too many of its chances already. Let’s see what the surfers and the skateboarders and the climbers can offer.
I’ ll check them out between three-on-three basketball games.
