Mahiro Takana is a nine-year-old girl from a small rice farming village in Japan. She loves to wear pink and her favorite snack is chocolate. She enjoys skateboarding and bouncing on the trampoline. She is a dedicated student, who completes her homework before dinner.
And she has a black belt in karate, three Japanese national karate championships, and a dream of competing in the Olympics. And she is now the star of singer Sia’s new music video ‘Alive’. It has about 30,000,000 hits on YouTube alone.
Karate is not an official Olympic competition, but Mahiro was selected to help showcase Tokyo’s bid for the 2020 Summer Games, and calls herself an ambassador for karate.
Hopefully it’ll become an Olympic sport, Mahiro told CBS News.
Five additional sports are likely to join the Olympic Games in 2020, marking a departure from past Olympics, which it was extremely difficult for new sports to join.
Tokyo’s organizing committee Monday proposed five additional sports for inclusion in the 2020 Summer Games: karate, sports climbing, surfing, skateboarding and, under a combined bid, baseball and softball. The International Olympic Committee will make the final decision in August, 2016.
If ratified by the committee, the new sports would serve as evidence that recent changes to IOC rules have succeeded in making it easier for additional sports to be added.
In December 2014, the committee nixed a 28-sport limit, and instead set a cap of 10,500 athletes and 310 medal events at the Summer Games. That means there is no limit on the number of sports, only on the number of medals. Monday’s proposal would add 18 medal events and an additional 474 athletes to the menu.
The new committee guidelines allow the host countries to propose the addition of one or more additional events for their own editions of the Games.
Because the new IOC rules give the host city a say in nominating additional sports, both baseball and karate were seen as strong contenders. Karate’s roots lie in what is now Okinawa prefecture, Japan. Baseball is Japan’s most popular spectator sport.
Panel head Fujio Mitarai also said appeal to younger people was an important consideration in the panel’s decision.
I think that the Olympic Games are an event that should reflect the trends of the times through youth.”
The other finalists not chosen were bowling, squash and wushu.
Given the unconscionable attempt to remove wrestling from the Olympics, the addition of karate, surfing, and sports climbing is a little peculiar. How many people even knew that sports climbing is a thing?
Sources: Global News + WSJ
