Will eSports one day be a part of the Olympic Games? It won’t happen in Paris 2024 and probably not LA28 either, but the day could be coming sooner rather than later.
Vincent Pereira, the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) head of virtual sports and gaming believes the IOC “needs to be involved in eSports” in order to attract younger audiences.
Speaking at the Sports Matters conference in Singapore, Pereira said, “Seventy-five per cent of people support the integration of eSports into the Olympic Movement in a similar way to the Commonwealth Games and Asian Games.”
“The most important thing is to bring together the Olympic Movement and the esports communities to collaborate on the future of these competitions.”
No timeline of when eSports might take it’s place among swimming, athletics and basketball as an official Olympic sport was given, but last year the IOC did pledge to “encourage the development of virtual sports and future engage with gaming opportunities” inline with their Agenda 2020+5.
“We’re talking with big eSports athletes,” Pereira said. “Representing their country, their flag, their nation – which we’ve seen at the Commonwealth Games for example – is something they have come to love.”
“Competition is at the heart of the Olympic Games and, at the IOC, we are hoping to introduce new competition programs and new disciplines as we will see with breaking coming for Paris 2024 and skateboarding in Tokyo 2020. And so what we’re trying to do is find a way of integrating these new ways of competing.”
Before eSports can dream of Olympic inclusion, they first need a governing body.
The International Esports Federation and Global Esports Federation are the two biggest organizing bodies, but neither are recognized by the IOC. Combining forces into one governing body is likely the first step towards future recognition.
“The question for us is how we can bring eSports into the Olympics to make the Olympics bigger,” he said. “When we’re seeing stadiums full of people wearing jerseys of their eSports teams, we see there are a lot of similarities between esports and the Olympic Movement. Now we can build something together because there is a lot of emotions and passions around these worlds. And this is what sports is about.”
The IOC is in talks with Singapore about hosting the 2023 Olympic eSports Week, a festival of virtual sports and gaming which would come on the heels of the last year’s inaugural Olympic Virtual Series.
Últimas Noticias
Sinner-Alcaraz, the duel that came to succeed the three phenomenons
Table tennis: Brazil’s Bruna Costa Alexandre will be Olympic and Paralympic in Paris 2024
Rugby 7s: the best player of 2023 would only play the medal match in Paris
Rhonex Kipruto, owner of the world record for the 10000 meters on the road, was suspended for six years
Katie Ledecky spoke about doping Chinese swimmers: “It’s difficult to go to Paris knowing that we’re going to compete with some of these athletes”
