Surfing hasn’t even made its Olympic debut and it’s already overcome a major hurdle for inclusion in the Paris Games in 2024. Photo: Wikimedia Commons/WSL
The Olympic torch has yet to arrive in Tokyo, nary a single competitor has qualified to represent their country in surfing’s Olympic debut, and we’re already looking ahead to the next iteration of the Summer Games in Paris in 2024.
In a Thursday announcement, the International Surfing Association explained that surfing was among the sports included on a shortlist of new sports that organizers for Paris 2024 hope to feature when the next Summer Games descend on the French capital. The plan was formally submitted this week to the International Olympic Committee for approval.
“Today is another amazing milestone in Surfing’s Olympic wave,” said ISA President Fernando Aguerre. “We are excited and humbled that Paris 2024 has included surfing on its list of proposed sports for the 2024 Olympic Games. This announcement takes us one step closer towards our goal of long-term Olympic inclusion.”
New sports will be granted provisional approval at the 134th IOC Session in Lausanne, Switzerland on June 24th, 2019 and will receive formal confirmation in December 2020 after the Tokyo Games, explains the ISA release. Presumably, the IOC Executive Board is hedging in the case that surfing, skateboarding, rock climbing, or any of the events that will be new in 2020 are complete flops.
Speaking of flops, it’s no secret that prospective competitors have their reservations about competing at Ichonimiya Beach – the official coastal venue for Olympic surfing in 2020. For a time there, it appeared that there might be a possibility a Kelly Slater Wave Company pool could come to the rescue, but timelines what they are that now appears unlikely. And the ISA has assured us on numerous occasions that Olympic surfing will happen in the ocean. Full stop.
Looking ahead to Paris, if surfers find themselves competing in knee-high slop in Japan, the IOC may have an appetite to shift gears for 2024. In December 2017, a project called T’ERRE D’EAUX that would plop a Wavegarden Cove in the Parisian suburb of Sevran was announced. And, WSL CEO Sophie Goldschmidt has been especially bullish about efforts to bring a Surf Ranch to France saying in a February interview with SportsPro, “We’re looking at building a couple in Paris.” The IOC has options for 2024, in other words, and we’re still five years out.
Come 2020, you can bet Paris 2024 organizers and IOC execs will anxiously be checking forecasts to see what the ocean dishes up for Olympic surfers. How many eyeballs an internationally televised surf event is able to capture will no doubt be the final say on surfing’s Olympic future. Until then, everything else is just noise.
