On Monday evening, the sports director of the International Olympic Committee, Kit McConnell, announced that the men's 50km walk will be replaced by a "mixed event" in track and field to be defined at the 2024 Paris Olympics.
The men's 50km walk will change its formula. For the Paris 2024 Games, this athletics event will become mixed, but it remains to be defined.
The goal is "to achieve gendre parity" for the first time in the history of Olympic athletics, but without exceeding the overall quota of athletes, said Kit McConnell, sports director of the International Olympic Committee, that the men's and women's competitions of the 20 km walk will remain.
Reduction in the number of athletes
The 50km walk is both the longest track and field event of the Olympic Games and one of the few taking place outside the stadium, alongside the marathon.
As such, it rewards the toughest athletes who sometimes find themselves competing in often difficult summer conditions.
The website franceinfo, belonging to france.tv and radiofrance recalls that the 50km walk, in the Olympic history of France, was marked by a succession of abandons and in particular by the Calvary of the Frenchman Yohann Diniz at the Rio 2016 Olympics, victim of a violent indisposition and fell three times. He took his revenge by becoming world champion a year later in London.
The elimination of this race fulfils the IOC's desire to reduce the number of participants in the Games, which will drop from 11.092 in Tokyo to 10.500 in Paris, reaching gender parity. Because creating a 50km walk for women would "increase the overall number of athletes entered", the IOC preferred a mixed event that has yet to be defined by World Athletics, said Kit McConnell.
Along with race walking in the athletics program, weightlifting has seen the largest reduction in quota places and will see four events removed from the programme.
On the contrary, skateboarding, sport climbing, surfing and breaking were officially approved onto the Paris 2024 programme, as had been widely expected. The "breaking" which, for those who are not aware of it, is an urban dance style born during the 70s in the Bronx, a suburb of New York, whose pioneers were young African-Americans and Puerto Ricans.