![]() She has just turned 13 and is Team GB's youngest ever summer Olympian. Hers is probably a name you've heard by now, but Britain's Sky Brown could well be a contender in the women's park, having won World Championships bronze in 2019. Competitors climb the curves at speed to perform mid-air tricks, accompanied by music.Įighty athletes will compete among four medal events, with men and women competing in both disciplines. ![]() Park skateboarding takes place on a hollowed-out course that features complicated curves. Street skateboarding sees athletes take on obstacles including rails, stairs, kerbs, benches, walls and slopes, using each section to demonstrate their skills and tricks during a set time limit. Competitors perform individually and are ranked for the overall level of difficulty and originality of their routines. There are two disciplines of skateboarding, street and park. Sandra Sanchez is a six-time kata European champion Skateboarding Spain's multi-world and European medallist Damian Quintero is also an aeronautical engineer, but quit his job to focus on karate full-time when it was announced as an Olympic sport. Japan have long dominated karate's World Championships and Ryo Kiyuna, who is from the sport's heartland, Okinawa, is a three-time kata world champion.īut watch out for Spain too - Damian Quintero and world champion Sandra Sanchez are the top-ranked karatekas in the kata discipline. Both will have an equal split of men and women competing. ![]() There will be 80 athletes competing in karate events at Tokyo 2020 - 60 in kumite and 20 in kata. There are three weight classes and they are awarded points for the techniques used. Kumite, on the other hand, is a combat discipline, and sees karatekas go head-to-head in a three-minute fight. Kata - which means 'shape' or 'model' - is a solo discipline, in which competitors, or karatekas, are judged on a series of pre-approved choreographed offensive and defensive movements. Karate originated on the Japanese island of Okinawa, and there are two disciplines of the martial art being contested in Tokyo - kata and kumite. So what's new? Let's get you up to speed. The International Olympic Committee added five sports - and 34 new events in total - to the Tokyo programme in a bid to attract younger audiences and reflect "the trend of urbanisation of sport".
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