Climb on

Twenty-one-year-old Emma Hunt wedges her feet into curved rock climbing shoes. She’s at Stone Summit, a rock climbing gym in Kennesaw, Ga., where she spends over 25 hours every week training for the 2024 Olympic Games. Hunt is a speed climber, and the Paris Olympics will for the first time feature her discipline as a distinct category within rock climbing. That’s just one of the many updates coming to this year’s games.

Starting in late July, athletes will compete in 32 sports. To be included in the Olympics, a sport must be recognized by the International Olympic Committee, the organization that oversees the games. The IOC will only consider adding a sport if it is practiced by men in at least 75 countries and women in no fewer than 40.

The International Federation of Sport Climbing petitioned the IOC in 2015 to include climbing in the Olympic Games. The following year, the IOC agreed to unveil the sport at the 2020 Summer Olympics. The IOC also included surfing and skateboarding at those games, held in Tokyo. Both sports will return this year.

Breaking (or breakdancing) will make its first Olympic appearance this summer. Competitors will face off in three rounds of one-minute dance battles. America’s Sunny Choi and Canada’s Phil Wizard are among the favorites.

The IOC can also add new variations of current Olympic sports, as it did with Hunt’s event. Sport climbing is divided into three categories: boulder, lead, and speed. Boulder and lead climbers scale new rock formations almost every time they compete. The rocks on speed walls are always arranged in the same way, and climbers like Hunt are judged on how fast they can press a buzzer at the top.

“Lead and bouldering are like problem solving in the moment,” Hunt says. “Speed is like a rehearsed track.”

At the Tokyo Olympics, athletes competed in all three categories for one set of medals. As soon as Hunt heard speed climbing would be a recognized variation, she began training for Paris. Most days, it takes 30 minutes to warm up for her climb. But she spends less than half a minute on the nearly 50-foot Olympic speed walls. Her all-time record is 6.30 seconds.

Hunt is one of 34 women climbing in the Olympics this year, up from 20 in the previous games. That increase is part of a new gender quota set by the IOC. For the first time ever, the 2024 Olympics will include an even number of male and female athletes: 5,250 of each.

Michele Donnelly is a professor of sport management at Ontario’s Brock University. While she thinks so-called “gender parity” is a step in the right direction, it could have some unintended consequences. “What we’ve seen, really problematically as far as I’m concerned, is that men’s events have been removed in order to add women’s events,” Donnelly said.

For example, the IOC nixed the men’s 50 kilometer relay after 2020 and replaced it with a mixed-gender event. But the equality push hasn’t left men out entirely. This year, men may compete on artistic swimming teams, a sport previously reserved for women.

Making the games doesn’t guarantee a sport will stick around. Tug-of-war, first introduced in 1900, got cut after appearing in five games. Rock climbing could also be discontinued if worldwide participation dips.

Hunt isn’t thinking about that now. She’s focused on the wall: “I’ve had races where I’ve slipped, but the other girl fell,” she says. “So I won the race because I stayed on. … It’s a lot of emotions to handle in like six seconds.”