Tokyo Olympics: Karate and Skateboarding performances pave way for new generation

Four new sports made their debut at the Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympics: karate, skateboarding, surfing and climbing. But for Japan, it was karate and skateboarding – and the breakthrough performances of their athletes in both sports – that will warm hearts and stay in the memory for years to come.

Miki Nakamichi, a karate instructor at Keio University and a volunteer during karate events, says: “It was fantastic. It was really nice to watch the women’s event. It was the kata. I got to see all the really highly ranked karate players. I felt [really emotional]. It was really close and a very good match.”

A fourth-degree blackbelt, Nakamichi is talking about one of two categories – kata (forms) and kumite (fighting) – that defined karate competitions at the Games: kata is a performance of movements similar to shadowboxing, while kumite is a sparring match between two opponents trying to score points via kicks and punches to the body and head.

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Nakamichi’s excitement stemmed from watching the Women’s Individual Kata match at the Games earlier this week, when Spain’s Sandra Sanchez took gold and Japan’s Kiyou Shimizu won silver in closely matched performances. But Sanchez and Shimizu’s match  was not the only performance that caught the eye and stirred the emotions – skateboarding, too, had its moment of jaw-dropping awe.

“It was amazing that, at the age of a junior high school student, she could compete with adults. And, I never imagined that she would win gold; it’s quite a feat,” says Munekazu Kitajima, the manager at Skateboard Park, a skateboarding school and park in Yokohama, a city which neighbours Tokyo.

Kitajima, a skateboarding school manager who was watching the no-crowd Games on television, talks about prodigious Japanese skateboarder Momiji Nishiya. At 13, Nishiya is Japan’s youngest-ever gold medal winner in an Olympic sport and the third-youngest gold medal winner in Olympic history.

On 26 July, three days after the Tokyo Olympics began, she defeated rivals Rayssa Leal from Brazil and compatriot Yuna Nakayama to take the top prize in the Women’s Street category – which is one half of the skateboarding categories at the Olympics, with the other being the Women’s Park.

Karate player Shimizu and skateboarder Nishiya’s stand-out performances were only the start, however. As the Tokyo Olympics 2020 drew to a close, Japan had won five medals in skateboarding, including gold medals for Sakura Yosozumi in Women’s Park and Yuto Horigome in Men’s Street. And in karate, Japan had won two medals – Shimizu’s silver medal and Ryo Kiyuna’s gold in Men’s Individual Kata.

Becoming an Olympic sport was a major milestone for karate and skateboarding. Yet the journey each sport took to the Games was very different. In karate’s case, years-old rivalries between schools meant the art, which was established in the early 1900s, didn’t have a universal governing body – a prerequisite to becoming an Olympic sport, until recently.

Nakamichi explains: “I’ve been doing karate for 30 years. Since I was young, when I told people that I do karate, [they] would ask me, ‘Is karate in the Olympics?’ And I would say, ‘Oh, karate has [too] many different styles, groups and organisations for [it] to be in the Olympics’.”

If the challenge for karate was its many rival schools and lack of a single, unified representative body, the problem for skateboarding concerned its negative association with mostly youth-oriented, street cultures – including graffiti, hip-hop and street fashion.

Daizo Shiode, the manager at skateboarding brand Instant, a store in Shibuya Ward, the epicentre of youth culture in Tokyo, says: “Until now, if you told someone, ‘I’m skateboarding,’ they would think you are part of a delinquent culture; the ‘bad culture’.

“But now, you have athletes like Horigome Yuto or the young girl Momiji-chan or Kokona Hiraki-chan, who have won… So, we will have more people interested in skateboarding the way young people are interested in soccer or baseball. It will become an appealing culture while keeping its street culture.”

A 21-year skateboarding veteran, shop manager Shiode references Japanese skateboarder Hiraki Kokona, who won silver in the Women’s Park event behind her compatriot, gold medallist Yozomi, but ahead of bronze medallist Sky Brown, 13, whose heritage is British and Japanese.

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For Shiode and Kitajima, Japan’s stand-out performances in skateboarding, in particular the eyebrow-raising wins of its young female players, will have at least one effect: a sudden increase in practitioners, in particular girls. Indeed, as Shiode spoke, a girl who is around seven years in age walked into his store with her father and walked out with a new skateboard, with protectors and helmet.

Kitajima notes, thinking about the number of young people that are frequent users of his school and park: “It is spreading as a sport that young people are crazy about. Recently, the [average] age [of the participants] has been younger [because they have access to] this skateboard park.” Many of them have been inspired by the Tokyo 2020 Games and the same may be happening abroad.

Soph Elden, the chapter director of Seattle non-profit group Skate Like A Girl, agrees: “Visibility such as this makes an inspiring impact on skaters in our community. We expect to see even more young women, trans and non-binary skaters on skateboards in the coming years. This is a monumental and inspiring moment in skateboarding!”

Instructor Nakamichi, too, has high hopes that karate’s inclusion in this year’s Games will have a similar effect on her sport. Indeed, it was exposure to the sport at an early age that led, in her case, to a three-decades-long career in the martial art.

She says: “I was watching my father and my brother coming back from karate practices. What was interesting was that [my brother’s] obi (belt) kept changing colour and I always remember thinking, ‘Oh, his belt changed again.’ The idea of the belt changing because of how well you’re doing was very interesting for me.

“So the whole idea about karate is not about doing it once and getting it the first time; it’s a repetition, a continuation of working on the same technique and working on yourself. That’s what I thought was interesting. That’s the reason why I started. I think that’s why I’m still doing karate after all these years.”