Olympic 2024 sports

The 2024 Paris Olympic competition schedule features all major finals in gymnastics, swimming and track and field in the evenings, surfing in Tahiti scheduled for the first four full days of the Games and the Olympic debut of breaking on the final weekend.

The Games — July 24-Aug. 11 — feature 329 medal events, 10 fewer than the record 339 in Tokyo. Paris hosts for a record-tying third time, 100 years after its last time hosting.

It’s the first Olympics held in Western Europe since 2012, and the timing of events will largely resemble those London Games.

With the six-hour time difference, the major gymnastics, swimming and track and field finals will take place in the afternoon Eastern time.

MORE: Full 2024 Paris Olympic competition schedule

In a break from tradition, handball will be the first competition of the Games, two days before the Opening Ceremony. France shares the Olympic record for handball medals (seven) and gold medals (four), including sweeping the men’s and women’s golds in Tokyo.

As usual, preliminary soccer matches will also start on the Wednesday before the Opening Ceremony at venues across the country, including Bordeaux, Lyon, Marseille, Nantes, Nice and Saint-Etienne. Group play in rugby also starts that day.

It’s no surprise that surfing, with Tahiti approved as the venue two years ago, is scheduled for the first four full days of the Games, allowing cushion in case weather forces delays. Surfing debuted at the Tokyo Games and will remain on the program through the 2028 Los Angeles Games.

Tahiti, an island in French Polynesia that is about 9,800 miles from Paris, will break the record for farthest Olympic medal competition to be held away from the host. In 1956, equestrian events were moved out of Melbourne due to quarantine laws and held five months earlier in Stockholm, some 9,700 miles away.

Breaking is the lone sport on the Paris program that will make its Olympic debut, though it was held at the last Youth Summer Olympics in 2018.

Other Paris 2024 highlights include:

• An Opening Ceremony that will be the first of its kind — held outside along the Seine River with boats carrying athletes along famous landmarks, climaxing with the Eiffel Tower.
• Competition venues including Roland Garros for tennis and boxing, Champ de Mars near the Eiffel Tower for beach volleyball and the Palace of Versailles for equestrian and modern pentathlon.
• A mass participation marathon held in relation to the Olympics on the Olympic marathon route.

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Mikaela Shiffrin won the season-opening slalom for her 75th career World Cup victory and broke the female record she shared with Lindsey Vonn for the most podiums in a single discipline.

“It’s a bit hard to explain what it means because it’s a pretty big number, actually,” said Shiffrin, who is third all-time in World Cup wins behind Ingemar Stenmark (86) and Vonn (82). “So many years I’ve been racing now. Every single race that I won had some special meaning. I don’t think, as a human, I can feel that many emotions at one time. Actually, I don’t think about 75. I just think about this one.”

Shiffrin, third after the first of two runs in Levi, Finland, had the best second run to prevail by .16 of a second over Swede Anna Swenn Larsson combining times from both runs.

ALPINE SKIING: Full Results | Broadcast Schedule

The winner’s prize in Levi is a reindeer. Shiffrin “won” her fifth reindeer, though the animals stay in Europe.

German Lena Duerr, the first run leader, was last to go in the second run. She still held a lead of .38 over Shiffrin halfway through her second run, but lost nearly a second to the next split and finished in fourth place behind Olympic champion Petra Vlhova of Slovakia.

“Everybody’s like, ‘Who’s better, Petra or Mikaela?'” Shiffrin said of Vlhova, who in the last Olympic cycle overtook Shiffrin as the top-ranked slalom skier. “To be honest, I think when we both push on our very, very best skiing, you actually don’t know who’s going to win. I think that’s what makes it exciting. I would like to say I’m always going to win if I’m skiing the best, but it’s not really true. It’s just who pushes a little bit harder and who hits the timing exactly right.”

Shiffrin, who ended last season with her worst run of slalom results since she was a 17-year-old rookie (DNF at the Olympics, ninth, eighth), earned her 67th World Cup slalom podium. Vonn made 66 downhill podiums. Stenmark holds the overall record with 81 slalom podiums, plus 72 giant slalom podiums.

Shiffrin’s 48 World Cup slalom wins are most for any Alpine skier in any discipline.

She has started 100 career slaloms among the Olympics, world championships and World Cup and won 53 of them, all in her last 87 starts.

The women race another slalom in Levi on Sunday.

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Best. In. The. World.🔥 Mikaela Shiffrin wins today’s World Cup in Levi to secure World Cup win number 75 AND to become the record holder for the most World Cup podiums in a single discipline🏆

Highlights (free) are available NOW on https://t.co/Y7ZlIbcGro🙌#stifelusalpineteam pic.twitter.com/N7tsDYLPFY

— U.S. Ski & Snowboard Team (@usskiteam) November 19, 2022

Ice dancers Madison Chock and Evan Bates led a group of five U.S. figure skaters to qualify for December’s Grand Prix Final after the NHK Trophy event finished on Saturday.

Chock and Bates, three-time world medalists, finished runner-up to Canadians Laurence Fournier Beaudry and Nikolaj Sørensen at NHK in Japan, the fifth of six Grand Prix Series events that act as qualifiers for the Final, which takes the top six per discipline from the season.

The Final is often a preview of March’s world championships.

Chock and Bates qualified for the Final by combining their win at Skate America in October with their runner-up at NHK.

They became the first U.S. skaters in any discipline to qualify for seven Grand Prix Finals (if including last year, when the Final was canceled after the qualifying series finished). They will tie the U.S. record of six Grand Prix Final starts held by 2014 Olympic ice dance champions Meryl Davis and Charlie White.

Bates, 33, broke the record of oldest American to qualify for a Final held by pairs’ skater Todd Sand from the 1996-97 season. Bates is already the only U.S. figure skater to compete in four Winter Olympics and the oldest to win a medal (in the team event).

Chock and Bates will look for their first Grand Prix Final title, and the biggest international title of their careers, after silver medals at the event in 2014, 2015 and 2019.

They rank fifth in the world this season by best total score (209.13 points). Canadians Piper Gilles and Paul Poirier, who have not gone head-to-head with Chock and Bates this season, rank first with 215.70 points.

None of the Olympic medalists from February are competing this fall: French Gabriella Papadakis and Guillaume Cizeron are taking at least this season off. Viktoria Sinitsina and Nikita Katsalapov are banned indefinitely, along with all Russian skaters, due to the war in Ukraine. Americans Madison Hubbell and Zachary Donohue retired.

NHK Trophy highlights air Sunday on NBC, NBCSports.com/live and the NBC Sports app.

MORE: NHK Trophy Results | Season Broadcast Schedule

Also Saturday, world champion Shoma Uno of Japan won the men’s event with the world’s second-best total score this season (279.76). Only American Ilia Malinin has scored higher this season (280.37 to win Skate America).

Uno and Malinin will go head-to-head for the first time this fall at the Grand Prix Final, should Malinin have a decent result at his second Grand Prix start next week in Finland.

Also at NHK, Yelim Kim held off world champion Kaori Sakamoto of Japan to become the second South Korean to win a Grand Prix after 2010 Olympic champion Yuna Kim.

The NHK results also ensured world junior champion Isabeau Levito earned a place in the Final with her second-place finishes at two prior Grand Prix events. Levito, 15, is the youngest American to qualify for a Final since Caroline Zhang in 2007.

Fellow Americans Starr Andrews and Amber Glenn followed their first Grand Prix podiums earlier this season by placing ninth and 11th at NHK. They needed podium finishes to remain in contention to qualify for the Final.

Japan’s Riku Miura and Ryuichi Kihara won the pairs’ title at NHK, improving on their world-leading score this season. Americans Emily Chan and Spencer Howe were second to join the Japanese in the Grand Prix Final. Americans Brandon Frazier and Alexa Knierim, the world champions, and Canadians Deanna Stellato-Dudek and Maxime Deschamps qualified for the Final earlier this month.

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