The International Olympic Committee (IOC) confirmed the sport program for the 2024 Paris Olympics. Breaking, or the sport of breakdancing, will make its Olympic debut.
The Paris 2024 lineup will also include new Olympic sports skateboarding, sport climbing, and surfing. All three of those sports are set to make their Olympic debuts at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, now pushed to the summer of 2021.
Despite the addition of a new sport, the overall athlete quota will actually shrink from the 2020 Olympics. Tokyo’s overall athlete quota is set at 11,092. But the IOC says that Paris will feature a 10,500-athlete quota. The event also reduced the number of officials needed, in order to reduce the size and complexity of the Olympics. The IOC had announced plans to cut down on the overall athlete quota as far back as June.
“The reduction across the 28 sports has been proportionate and focused on those sports that can best absorb the reduction, whilst maintaining the universality of the Games,” the IOC writes in its press release.
Here are the athlete quotas for swimming and other aquatic sports, compared to the 2020 Olympics. You can click on the Paris and Tokyo headers for full quota documents for all sports:
| Paris 2024 | Tokyo 2020 | |||||
| Women | Men | Total Athletes | Total Athletes | Women | Men | |
| Swimming | 426 (-13) | 426 (-13) | 852 (-26) | 878 | 439 | 439 |
| Open Water Swimming | 22 (-3) | 22 (-3) | 44 (-6) | 50 | 25 | 25 |
| Diving | 68 | 68 | 136 | 136 | 68 | 68 |
| Water Polo | 110 | 132 | 242 | 242 | 110 | 132 |
| Artistic Swimming | 96 (-8) | 0 | 96 (-8) | 104 | 104 | 0 |
| ALL AQUATICS | 722 (-24) | 648 (-16) | 1370 (-40) | 1410 | 746 | 664 |
Diving and water polo see no changes. (Water polo saw a reduction in women’s teams and athletes for the 2020 Olympic quotas.) The 2024 Olympics will allow for three fewer women and three fewer men to qualify in open water swimming. And the overall athlete quota for pool swimming will drop by 13 men and 13 women. Artistic swimming (formerly known as synchronized swimming) will drop by 8.
The IOC says the Paris 2024 Olympics will have exactly 50% male and female participation. That’s been a key goal of the IOC the past several Olympic cycles. Rio featured 45.6% female participation overall. Tokyo is set to feature 48.8% female participation. And Paris should have exactly even numbers of men and women competing across all sports.
The IOC also says that 28 out of 32 Olympic sports will be fully gender equal for the Paris 2024 Olympics.
We lose swimming spots for break dancing. Just stop and let that sink in for a minute.
Can LA reverse this in 2028?
LA itself couldn’t. The IOC is the one that decides Olympic programmes.
While they’re certainly related, the addition of breakdancing isn’t the direct cause of swimming’s lowered quota numbers. Paris announced their plan to lower athlete numbers back in June, six months before breaking was added to the sport programme. The reduced athlete quota is more about making the event easier to host and manage, after we’ve seen a number of potential host cities withdraw from the bidding process and a number of past host cities struggling to justify the amount they had to spend on hosting requirements.
Does this basically mean no relay only swimmers?
Will be difficult if swimmers competing in multiple events have to do prelims and finals for relays
Doesn’t look like it’ll make a big impact, as the total athletes is only going down by 26. 174 nations competed in swimming in 2016 so we’re looking at roughly 0.15 less per nation, assuming it’s distributed evenly.
It won’t be. How many countries had low single digit entries? They will all be the same.
It is going to be taken off the countries with larger groups of competitors. Perhaps one less relay only swimmer for teams with a 4×100 relay entered would be my guess.
it would be good to skip relay only swimmers, earn your way in.
Relay only swimmers still earn their way! To say this is taking away from the immense amount of time and energy these swimmers put in.
Implying relay only swimmers didn’t earn there spot on the relay?
I mean… we could indeed get rid of “morning swimmers”, 4 swimmers per relay and that’s it
One thing that could be done to not affect the number of swimmers competing in individual events could be to reduce the number of relay only swimmers from a maximum of 12 for a country down to 8 or 10.