To analyse
Skateboarding: The IOC is lucky that teenagers are allowed to ride too
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Tokyo has shown that it is right that skateboarding is Olympic. Now the Olympic Committee has to ask itself: should the gamers also be included?
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Sky Brown is only 13 years old and has already won a bronze medal.
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Is that a sport? Jump on a banister with a roller board and slide down on it? Catapult yourself into the air with the board and turn twice around your own axis? Naturally. It requires coordination, skill and the will to train a sequence of movements over and over again until it is perfect.
But is that part of the Olympic Games? Naturally. The skaters in Tokyo impressively demonstrated this by taking some of the most spectacular pictures of these summer games. Only a few purists in the scene see it differently. For them, skating is a way of life and not a sport. That is why it is inappropriate to compete and race for medals. But it is forgotten that many skaters have been doing this for a long time – for example at the X-Games, a kind of Olympic Games for freestyle sports.
–With one giant leap on the railing: Olympic winner Yuto Horegome
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Skateboarding – like the sports BMX freestyle and surfing, which also had their Olympic premiere this year – has a lot to do with aesthetics. It’s not about who is the fastest, the tallest or the furthest. Rather, those who use obstacles as creatively as possible in order to perform daring tricks in the most stylish way possible. It is obvious that this cannot be assessed completely objectively. It also has a lot to do with taste. Because skateboarding is not just a sport, it is also an art – similar to gymnastics and figure skating, which have long been among the top disciplines at the Olympics.
It is a misconception that the Olympic accolade will lead to the commercialization of skateboarding. Skateboarding has long been a business too. In a sense, skateboarders were influencers even before social media existed. Clothing brands paid her to be seen in the right outfit in the skate videos and skate magazines. The feeling of freedom that comes with skateboarding is the perfect advertising environment.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) is now also benefiting from this. The skateboard legend Tony Hawk has it in the Interview in a nutshell with this newspaper:
“Skateboarding doesn’t need the Olympic Games. But the Olympics need skateboarding because the sport is cool and it attracts a much younger crowd. “
The IOC should like the fact that the skateboard federation – unlike the federation of female gymnasts – waives an age limit. So it happens that no women under the age of 16 do gymnastics on the horizontal bar or bars, but twelve and 13-year-olds are already rolling over the skate park. How healthy this is for the development of young people is another question.
The fact is: women skating in particular is shaped by young talents who attract a lot of attention. Above all, the 13-year-old bronze medal winner Sky Brown, who serves an audience of millions on her Instagram and YouTube channel and is a role model for many girls.
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Sky Brown skates on a mega-ramp with Tony Hawks.
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It’s actually surprising that the IOC has waited so long to take up skateboarding, surfing and BMX freestyle. Sure, you can’t increase the competition at will. But there is the possibility of replacing a few outdated disciplines. Because in the world of action sports there is still a lot that could electrify the Olympic audience.
For example, it is incomprehensible that in mountain bikes only the cross-country discipline is Olympic and that no downhill races and no slopestyle competitions are held. Although their stars on YouTube and Instagram cause much more sensation than Nino Schurter and Jolanda Neff.
–Thousands make the pilgrimage to the stadium to experience e-athletes live like here at the League of Legends Final in France
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But the big question for the IOC is not: Which freestyle sport should be included next? But: Should gaming also be Olympic? E-sports, as professional gaming is called, is once again enjoying far more attention on the Internet than action sports. The «Fortnite» player Tyler «Ninja» Blevins has 24 million subscribers on Youtube. For comparison: Cristiano Ronaldo has 1.8 million, Roger Federer 33,000.
But is e-sports a sport? Skill, tactics, outstanding hand-eye coordination and the will to achieve perfection are required. It doesn’t have much to do with movement in the narrower sense. But neither does Olympic shooting.
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