LOOKING AHEAD, 2021 AND BEYOND: The new Olympians

What do you see once you have a look at a contingent of athletes at a multi-sport occasion? How many sports activities are you able to establish with only a look at their practitioners? Light and thin middle-and-long-distance runners. Tall swimmers, with unusually lengthy torsos and arms. Wrestlers with heavily-padded higher our bodies and fencers, carrying extra muscle of their legs.
Imagine that contingent, now with overawed, bespectacled teenagers, with neon of their hair. Or lean, match children sporting dreadlocks, topknots and fauxhawks, grooving and bobbing.
Yes, it’s enjoying on stereotypes however hardly frivolous. Expect the avid gamers and breakdancers to face out after they take the Asiad stage subsequent 12 months. Setting apart the philosophical debates, esports and breakdancing (or breaking) — regardless of having expert opponents and sizable followings — weren’t even labelled ‘fringe sports’ for lengthy. That tag was reserved for skateboarding, browsing and climbing, all set to make their Olympic bow in Tokyo.
Call it a bid to seize eyeballs, designs by companies or the altering sporting panorama. But gaming and breakdancing, lengthy the domains of the lazy and angsty, will now be giving rebellious edges to conventional multi-sport occasions. The two sports activities are poised to proceed using the momentum in 2021 earlier than subsequent 12 months’s debut on the Hangzhou Asian Games.
Select Indian avid gamers, although, have already had the expertise of sharing an Asian Games athletes’ village with the nation’s best.
Ankur Diwakar, a 30-year-old from Mumbai who represented the nation on the 2018 Asian Games the place esports debuted as an illustration occasion — remembers PV Sindhu and Dutee Chand lighting up upon assembly their latest colleagues.
“They were super-excited to learn more about it and wanted to play the games themselves,” Diwakar tells The Indian Express. “Everywhere I go, there are certain people wondering why there are people around me. ‘Are you a TikToker, an Instagrammer, an influencer?’ At the Asian Games, I was treated as an athlete.”
Diwakar performed soccer for Mumbai earlier than transferring his knowhow to the digital turfs of FIFA and Pro Evolution Soccer, the place he has dominated the circuits for greater than a decade as ‘JauntyTank’.

“I met a group of athletes who already had been playing football games casually. They asked me to teach them specific skills, how to take a certain free kick or make a move, to beat their teammates,” says Diwakar. “I was so proud of my country that everyone, at least every athlete, knew what esports is.”
Gujarat’s Tirth Mehta, the bronze medallist within the Hearthstone competitors, shared an identical expertise with this paper shortly after the Games.
“The fact that we were staying at the athletes’ village, with our contingent was symbolic for me,” mentioned Mehta. “I met Hima Das and Amit Panghal. They were very excited to know that I won a medal by playing a video game. Indian coaches were asking me about the event and telling me that esports also takes massive effort.”
There is one thing to that reciprocity. Michael Payne, who was IOC’s first advertising and marketing and broadcast rights director and stayed in that position for 20 years, says it’s as a result of a median fashionable athlete is clued in.
“If you go to the Athletes’ village, where you’ve got the 10,000 greatest athletes… In their downtime, they are doing a lot of esports training,” says Payne. “You go to Formula One and the drivers are even officially training on esports, using the (virtual) tracks for their training mechanism.”
But pushing video video games at these occasions can be the work of huge machines and larger machinations.
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In 2008, Jack Ma, co-founder of Alibaba, famously proclaimed that the Chinese e-commerce titan “would rather starve to death than live on games”. In 2010, Ma mentioned that Alibaba wouldn’t make investments one penny in video games as a result of “China pursues single-child policy. If children play games all the time, what will our country be like in the future?”
In 2018, Alibaba’s sports activities arm Alisports sponsored esports as an exhibition occasion on the Jakarta Asian Games. At the closing ceremony, Ma was handed over the Asiad flag to deliver to Hangzhou, host of the 2022 Games and his and Alibaba’s hometown.
Alibaba’s U-turn on video video games comes after the corporate’s foray into the medium in 2014. It can be a bid to compete with arch rival Tencent within the battle for Southeast Asia’s esports market. Gaming is a strategic vertical for Chinese conglomerates, and a sure-fire technique to generate income overseas as a result of decrease cultural and language boundaries.
Six video games had been featured in Jakarta: Arena of Valor, Clash Royale and League of Legends are owned by Tencent. Hearthstone and Starcraft II are made by America’s Activision Blizzard, an organization Tencent has invested in. The solely title with no Tencent connection was Japanese giants Konami’s Pro Evolution Soccer. The Asian Games look led to a bump within the gross sales of the aforementioned titles, and Alibaba too would search for a slice of cross-promotion.
Although the Asian Games has been conquered, Olympics, and zeroing in on appropriate titles for it, is a special problem altogether for esports. International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach repeatedly mentioned that he wouldn’t stand for violence in video games — even cartoonish, aesthetic or over-the-top — successfully ruling out a significant chunk of {the catalogue}. Last April, Bach referred to as for the motion to “urgently” examine digital variations of sports activities and method sport publishers.
In principle, it ought to make gaming’s transition from recreation to Olympic sport extra palatable and simpler to observe. Last month, the primary official world championships in digital biking passed off, with 132 riders — together with Olympians and worlds medallists — from 22 nations racing within the fictional island of Watopia.
“Whether you’re playing with a football game or any one of the sports, I think there is a strong partnership and relationship,” says Payne. “It exposes new sports to the younger generation, exposes them to the rules, how it’s played, and it builds interest in the sport.”
That, nonetheless, would require high builders to change portfolio and concentrate on a distinct segment style of sports activities video games which aren’t FIFA or PES (Pro Evolution Soccer). The solely different titles which come near their ranges of polish are tied to North American properties resembling NBA, MLB, NHL and NFL.
Also, regardless of apparent curiosity, the IOC hasn’t moved in with esports as a result of lack of a transparent governing physique. The Asian Electronic Sports Federation (AESF) claims to be the “sole competent authority for electronic sports” within the area whereas South Korea’s International esports Federation organises parallel world championships.
“The IOC, when it wants to, can move surprisingly quickly for a mammoth organisation. Equally, it doesn’t want to get pressured into a decision that may look great today and clearly is the wrong horse tomorrow,” says Payne, for whom Tokyo could be the twentieth Olympic Games. “(In esports) there are three or four different organisations, all claiming to represent. If the IOC was to single out one, it would then be distorting the management profile, of ‘why that one and not the other three’.”
This 12 months holds the important thing for esports by way of fine-tuning and dealing in direction of that elusive Olympic spot.
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Breaking’s transfer from ‘cultural artform’ to a medal occasion has been comparatively simple. The sport flared, swiped and side-slid into the 2024 Paris Olympics programme after capturing the creativeness on the 2018 Youth Olympic Games in Argentina.
“The decision on breakdancing came from the local organising committee in France, as a host nation is allowed to propose two or three sports that they think are really appropriate to their set-up and culture,” says Payne. “That’s why the Japanese for Tokyo 2020 proposed karate and baseball, neither of which are then being proposed by Paris. So, you’re allowing for an element of customisation in the local market.”
It’s a symbiotic relationship. Dynamic and concrete, breaking goes with the Paris Games’ blueprint of a extra inclusive, gender-balanced and youth-centred occasion. For the game, in the meantime, it’s a stage to tell and educate.

“We have no intention of attempting to revolutionise the Olympics. Our only goal is to organise battles that respect, protect and reflect the history, culture and spirit of breaking,” says Jean-Laurent Bourquin, senior advisor to World Dance Sport Federation. “If we do that, the rest will take care of itself, as we are convinced that breaking brings a great deal of added value to the Olympic movement and will be an entertaining and inspiring addition to any Olympic event. Breaking truly has it all: amazingly talented dancers, hip-hop beats, MCs to keep things flowing, and the drama of head-to-head competition.”
Asked to envisage an Olympic contingent from 2036 Games, that includes B-boys and B-girls and E-athletes, Payne turns to at the moment’s gymnasts and swimmers.
“You look at the gymnasts or the synchronised swimmers of today, it might have raised eyebrows 40-50 years ago with people saying, ‘what are they doing on the Olympic programme?’ Now they are a core part of the programme. If you were to talk to the dancers, I’m not sure you would dispute some of their athletic capability,” says Payne. “The move to esports, that’s a big jump because you’re then looking at: if you want mental agility versus athletic agility. And you’ve got sports like chess, desperate to try and get on the programme.”
Diwakar, although, runs with the fantasy.
“It will absolutely happen. I only got serious for esports in 2011 and ’12, when it was being legitimised in Europe. I realised within 5-6 years India too will catch on,” says Diwakar.
He is 30, successfully 40 in gaming years. But whereas Diwakar admits that he’s not in his prime anymore, the dream of donning the India jersey once more and competing for an Asian Games medal in Hangzhou spurs him by means of the 10-hour every day coaching.
“This has given me a reason to train physically and keep my game sharp,” Diwakar says. “It still gives me chills, just thinking that I am preparing for the Asian Games. When I picked up the controller years ago, I had no clue that someday I would compete at the same level as a PV Sindhu or a Sushil Kumar.”