Olympic game with youth: on the back of children

19 + 12 + 13 = 44. Something like this could be a math problem in elementary school, maybe in second grade.

For some skateboarding Olympian, such a calculation will not be long ago.

Together, the medal winners in the Park discipline are 44 years old.

The skateboarders - in Tokyo for the first time in the Olympic program - should make the games more attractive for a young audience.

Behind this is also the hope of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to open up new markets.

The potential customers of tomorrow

The idea is by no means absurd.

Climbing, skating, 3 × 3 as a variant of basketball or surfing are all trendy sports.

Today's young viewers are tomorrow's potential customers.

If they are successfully brought on board, the IOC could counteract the loss of young viewers who are less able to do traditional sports than the generation of their fathers and grandfathers.

But may the IOC, which always invokes human dignity, carry out its expansion on the backs of - it should be said - children?

If you watch the broadcasts from the Olympic Games, you want to discover the best athletes in the world and see them fight for gold. In some sports, the world's youth are damned young. It has always been like that, for example in gymnastics. The Greek gymnast Dimitrios Loundras was ten years old when he won bronze on bars in 1896, the year the modern games were born under the aegis of Pierre de Coubertin.

But the world of sport has changed over the past 125 years.

The attention that is given to medal hopes is enormous, and with it the pressure to succeed.

This is also what the Tokyo Summer Games stand for.

Never before have athletes like the American gymnast Simone Biles talked so openly about the enormous strain that is placed on their shoulders and that brings them to their knees.

So shouldn't the IOC necessarily protect children better?

In front of yourself, in front of your parents, your coaches?

Go to the limits

High-performance sport means training every day, pushing your limits, sometimes even beyond. The question of how much self-determination a twelve-year-old athlete uses to shape her actions can hardly be answered from the outside. You can well imagine that a child like 14-year-old, amazingly mature-looking Lilly Stoephasius (9th place), loves and intrinsically motivated, stands on the skateboard every day and trains from her joy until she drops. However, if even twelve-year-olds are already competing for medals at the Olympics, they will hardly see the competition as a joke.

The largest stage in sport, including the huge spotlight, creates a lot of pressure.

With their interest in bringing the phenomenon of child stars closer to people, the media spark a hunt for the kids.

British Sky Brown, 13 years old, also stood on the podium during the award ceremony in the skateboard.

In contrast to most other children's athletes, she is used to the public interest.

She has 1.2 million subscribers on Instagram.

Your account: "Managed by Mom".

Her mother doesn't seem to have a problem with the media hoopla around Sky, which has long since been awarded a personal sponsorship contract with the American sporting goods manufacturer Nike.

Even more: she seems to be promoting the marketing of her thirteen-year-olds.

In cultures beyond the West, the motives for encouraging minors to perform at their best may be different. But does that change anything in the result? The 14-year-old Chinese Quan Hongchan jumped superior to gold from the ten-meter tower in Tokyo. She showed two perfect jumps. How she came to this fantastic body control at such a young age is not clear. But it is an open secret that in China, for example, or in isolated performance systems in the West, rigorous methods are sometimes used to produce medal winners, regardless of personal development.

The many stories in the past, the statements made by female athletes, have not remained hidden from the IOC. It has only a limited de jure influence on the international professional associations and their regulations. But it can and must use its power to enforce age restrictions. The insight seems there. Sky is not allowed to compete in the Youth Olympic Games: Participants must be 14 years old. An age limit of 16 years for the "real" games would therefore be consistent. That would increase the chance that talented children will be able to enjoy what is important to them a little longer: childhood.