Skateboarding -- with creative assistance from cycling's international governing body -- appears headed for the Olympics in a bid to make the 111-year-old Games more attractive to a younger audience.
Reaction in the skateboarding community has ranged from joy to skepticism to downright contempt, and stirred memories of the Olympic debut of snowboarding nearly 10 years ago.
Last week in Lausanne, Switzerland, members of the International Olympic Committee and the International Cycling Union discussed adding skateboarding as a discipline at the 2012 Games in London.
And in two weeks the management board of the cycling union is expected to adopt skateboarding, starting a two-year process that would make it part of the Olympic program. A final decision would be made in 2009 by the executive committee of the IOC.
If skateboarding is accepted -- and signs are it will be -- it will become the third action sport in the Olympics, joining snowboarding and BMX racing, which debuts next year in Beijing.
"From our side we are committed to help the development of skateboarding," said Enrico Carpani, a spokesman for the cycling union.
So, too, is the IOC.
Carpani said that at a meeting last year, Jacques Rogge, the IOC president, asked the cycling body to assist skateboarding with entry to the Olympics.
"There's a real wish within the IOC to engage with the youth and make a program that's very appealing to them," the IOC spokeswoman Emmanuelle Moreau said.
It is about time, according to the skateboarding icon Tony Hawk, who has helped organize the sport worldwide.
"I believe the chances are good" skateboarding will appear at the 2012 Games, Hawk wrote in an e-mail message.
"The Olympics desperately need a cool factor for their Summer Games. They finally figured out that snowboarding is more popular than curling during the winter. Now they need to make the same realization for summer sports," he wrote.
Snowboarding was a highly rated event on NBC at last year's Winter Games. But its debut as a skiing discipline at the 1998 Winter Games in Nagano, Japan, was dogged by controversy.
In 1994, snowboarding was brought under the auspices of the International Ski Federation. As a result, many snowboarders felt that skiing had hijacked their sport and several of the world's top riders boycotted the games. Even afterward, competitors complained that the ski federation's judging criteria emphasized amplitude (height) over creativity, effectively stifling the sport's most sacrosanct element -- style.
Although those problems have since mostly been resolved, the episode looms in the minds of many skaters.
Danny Way, a top professional skater who has won gold medals at the X Games has said he could foresee international judging becoming controversial.
Gary Ream has been leading Olympic efforts on behalf of skateboarding. He is also president of the International Skateboarding Federation, a coalition of skateboarders representing more than 30 countries.
"If you ask any skateboarder on the street, `Do you want to be in the Olympic Games,' especially in this country, they would probably say, `No,"' Ream said. "Because right off the bat, that's the coolest, easiest thing to say. And I would probably say that's the attitude of skateboarding in general."
But Ream believes skateboarding will wind up in the Olympics with or without the support of most skaters.
Still, skateboarding in the Olympics is unlikely to sit well with the sport's more hard-core elements. A major boycott by skaters in 2012 seems unlikely, however.
Olympic skateboarding would most likely feature the sport's vertical discipline, performed on massive halfpipe ramps like those featured in the X Games.
"There are plenty of successful skaters that have made their careers almost exclusively by competing," Hawk wrote.
"These are the ones that will rise to the occasion when offered a chance to be Olympic athletes. The irony is that the naysayers whose livelihoods are based in the skateboard industry will end up benefiting from the newfound global interest," he wrote.
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