Olympic sports
Type of sport with events contested at the Olympic Games / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Olympic sports are contested in the Summer Olympic Games and Winter Olympic Games. The 2020 Summer Olympics included 33 sports;[1] the 2022 Winter Olympics included seven sports.[2][3] Each Olympic sport is represented by an international governing body, namely an International Federation (IF).[4]
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The International Olympic Committee (IOC) establishes a hierarchy of sports, disciplines, and events.[4] According to this hierarchy, each Olympic sport can be subdivided into multiple disciplines, which are often mistaken as distinct sports. Examples include swimming and water polo, which in the Olympic scheme are disciplines of the sport of "Aquatics" (represented by World Aquatics),[5] and figure skating and speed skating, which are each disciplines of the sport of "ice skating" (represented by the International Skating Union).[6] In turn, disciplines are subdivided into events, for which Olympic medals are awarded.[4] The number and types of events may change slightly from one Olympiad to another.
Previous Olympic Games included sports that are no longer included in the current program, such as polo and tug of war.[7] Known as "discontinued sports", these have been removed due to either a lack of interest or the absence of an appropriate governing body for the sport.[4] Some sports that were competed at the early Games and later dropped by the IOC, have managed to return to the Olympic program, for example archery, which made a comeback in 1972, and tennis, which was reintroduced in 1988. The Olympics have often included one or more demonstration sports, normally to promote a local sport from the host country or to gauge interest in an entirely new sport.[8] Some such sports, like baseball and curling, were added to the official Olympic program (in 1992 and 1998, respectively). Baseball was discontinued after the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, only to be revived again for the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo, which saw the introduction of new disciplines within a number of existing Summer Olympic sports as well as several new sports, such as karate and skateboarding, making their Olympic debuts. Breakdancing will make its debut at the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris and Ski Mountaineering will debut at the 2026 Winter Olympics.