Shanghai and Budapest will host the first multi-sport qualifications for the Paris 2024 Olympic Games next May and June, in the form of festivals combining sporting events and culture, the International Olympic Committee announced on Thursday.
As early as April 2022, the body announced that it wanted to bring together skateboarding, BMX freestyle, breaking and climbing qualifications in spring 2024, an initiative planned in “compact and central urban sites”. Meeting on Thursday in Bombay, its executive commission designated two host cities familiar with major sporting events, namely Shanghai on the banks of the Huangpu River (May 16 to 19, 2024) then Budapest on the Ludovika campus (June 20 to 23, 2024).
“This will be the very last qualifying phase” for the four disciplines, bringing together 464 competitors to allocate “at least half of the places” for Paris 2024 in these sports, specifies the organization. The idea combines two priorities of the presidency of Thomas Bach, the current boss of the IOC: developing urban sports, likely to rejuvenate the Olympic audience and often requiring limited equipment, and better highlighting “the road to the Games », instead of limiting media visibility to the two weeks of the main competition.
For this, the body promises Olympic “festivals” of a new kind combining “sport, music, art and culture”, whose duration over three days and modest size make it possible to envisage a wide range of host cities. Unsurprisingly, Budapest immediately positioned itself, while the Hungarian capital very regularly hosts European or world championships – including the World Athletics Championships this summer, the last Europa League final and several Euro matches – 2020 football -, but seems too small for the Olympics.
