Karate dropped from Paris 2024 Olympics

[sensei8]

Karate is far more important than any person(s) and/or any Governing Body!! This decision is their to make, and they've made it; Karate will survive their decision(s)!!

[RW]

Furthermore, they really messed up by making it point fighting rather than knockdown like Kyokushin. Knockdown would’ve made differentiating karate from TKD far easier to the layperson IMO. What we have with the WKF rules is TKD without the emphasis on kicking in the layperson’s eyes at best. There’s not enough room for two sports that appear on the outside to be so similar.

Agree, too close to TKD, there's plenty of Olympic "combat" sports already. I think that in this day and age of "all violence is bad", "diversity" etc it would be very difficult to imagine the IOC accepting knockdown karate, especially for the female athletes. Boxing for example, I bet they would love to get rid of it too.

I think this reeks of politics, how can a sport get dropped from the olympics before it's even debuted?

It has absolutely nothing to do with politics. Each host nation is allowed I believe 4-6 “demonstration sports.” I don’t know the technical term nowadays though. Those sports are temporary, meaning they’re one and done by design. If a demonstration sport does very well, the IOC will contemplate making it a permanent sport. There’s a ton of factors in that though - viewership numbers and revenue generated, how well the sport is organized, how well it fits into their views of Olympic sports, etc. And there’s only so much room, so it’ll end up replacing something; what should it replace? And there’s a lot more to it than that.

Host countries typically include games/sports that are native to them and also sports that have a ton of national popularity. Karate being an Olympic sport in Tokyo is a no-brained under this criteria.

I’m sure Paris has some stuff they want to include. Why should they do karate any favors? They’ve only got a handful of sports they can include that’ll suffer the same fate as every demonstration sport Japan has included.

No one’s “dropping” karate. Karate was never on the slate for Paris to begin with. No one said “karate won’t do well, so let’s replace it with X.” It’s simply a matter of the IOC saying “These are the sports to be played. Include any 5 other sports you choose.” Of course there’s far more to it than that, but I think you understand what I’m getting at. You can’t cut something that wasn’t there to begin with. And that’s my issue with the above linked article. They’re trying to cause drama when none existed.

This makes more sense, thanks

[Age-Uke]

I'm going to agree with those who said it failed to distance itself from TDK.

To many TDK is Karate And IMO although not Japanese Karate (or Okinawan) it is a Karate (ie a Korean Karate)

I also concur that Karate's inclusion into the Olympics was just supposed to be temporarily caused by the host nation (Japan)

After 30+ yrs of Karate, I'm still on the fence on "Sport Karate"