Seven new events have been added to the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics programme, which paves the way for the highest representation of female athletes at the event, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) said on Wednesday. IOC’s executive board approved women’s monobob, freestyle ski big air (men and women), short track mixed relay, a ski jumping mixed team event, mixed gender team aerials and a snowboard cross mixed team event.
“The addition of these new events for Beijing 2022 reflects our continued commitment to make the Olympic Games programmes more youthful and gender balanced,” IOC sports director Kit McConnell said in a statement. “I am very pleased to see the increase of female athletes, especially in such exciting, ground-breaking events. At the same time, we are sending a message that the size of the Olympic Winter Games is being directly addressed.”
With this decision, the Beijing games will see an increase in female representation from 41 percent in Pyeongchang to 45.44 percent. A total of 46 women’s events will see 1 314 women athletes competing. The overall number of athletes was trimmed by 41 to 2 892, which is within the Olympic Charter framework, the IOC said.
The Games, which will feature a record number of female athletes, will debut the women’s monobob – a discipline trialled at youth level in 2016.
Skiing big air is included after a successful snowboard debut at the Pyeongchang Games earlier this year.Four mixed team events are also part of the programme in the Chinese capital. The changes mean there will be an equal number of events for men (two and four-man) and women (monobob and two-woman) in bobsleigh.
However, the decision to include monobob for women rather than the four-woman discipline has been criticised by some of the winter sport’s top competitors. Canadian bobsledder Alysia Rissling, who in 2015 was the pilot for the first ever all-woman team in an official four-woman bobsleigh event, has described the announcement by the IOC as “a sick joke”.
Three-time Olympic medallist Elana Meyers Taylor also posted on social media to say she was “disappointed that it is not the four-woman event as the female bobsledders requested. Unfortunately monobob does not add women to the sport and does not give us equal numbers to the men.”
The mixed team events included for Beijing 2022 are the snowboard cross, ski jumping, freestyle skiing aerials and short track relay. There is no place for women’s nordic combined, which remains a male-only event, while telemark also failed to gain enough votes for inclusion in the programme in four years’ time.
Aiming to cut organising costs, there should be 41 fewer athletes in Beijing than the 2,933 competitors at the Pyeongchang Olympics last February.
The IOC president Thomas Bach recently met with the Russian Federation president Vladimir Putin, to discuss the development of sport in society in Russia, in particular following the sanctions taken at the Olympic Winter Games PyeongChang 2018, where no Russian team was allowed to participate by the IOC, but carefully selected athletes participated under the name “Olympic Athlete from Russia”. They both agreed that in the interests of Russian athletes, now was the time to re-enter into a dialogue, to look to the future and to bring Russian sport fully back into the international sports community.
President Bach noted that in the interests of clean Russian athletes and for all athletes from around the world, the reinstatement of RUSADA by WADA was of the highest importance – and that the IOC would advise the Russian Olympic Committee (ROC) to undertake the necessary remaining steps in this direction to allow Russia to once again play a full and active role in the Olympic Movement.
President Bach also informed him that, as part of this process, on Monday he would meet with the newly elected NOC President, Stanislav Pozdnyakov, and other representatives from the Russian Olympic Committee to re-establish dialogue and cooperation.