While a lot of dedicated bowlers and bowling fans waste their time and energy arguing about whether things like lane conditions and ball technology are keeping bowling out of the Olympics, the International Olympic Committee and local Olympic organizers keep delivering a clear message.

That message got even more emphatic Thursday when organizers for the 2024 Paris Olympics announced that they will recommend four sports be added for 2024: breakdancing, rock climbing, surfing, and skateboarding. The Paris 2024 press kit is here.

The IOC Programme Commission will discuss the proposal before it is due to be put to the Executive Board at its next meeting March 26-28. The IOC Session in June will then offer provisional approval before the new additions are officially confirmed by the Executive Board in December 2020, InsideTheGames.com reported in this story.

Rock climbing, surfing, and skateboarding were added by the IOC for the 2020 Tokyo games at the request of the local organizers, along with baseball/softball and karate.

But if the IOC goes along with the request of the Paris organizers, which it did in the case of Tokyo, those two sports will be out in 2024, as will squash, the other reported finalist.

Bowling apparently wasn’t even a finalist, as it wasn’t mentioned in numerous media reports.

As I detailed in this lengthy story in the fall of 2015 when the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Organizing Committee made its sport requests, the chosen sports had one thing obviously in common: youth appeal.

That is only one of the criteria laid out by the IOC for sports seeking to join the Olympics and while the chosen sports may fall short in others such as gender equity and wide participation, youth appeal clearly is most significant to the Olympic movement.

The addition of breakdancing as a requested sport for 2024 puts an exclamation point on the statement IOC made for 2020. The fad of seemingly eons ago in the U.S. apparently has caught the fancy of kids, especially in France, which is reported to be a hotbed. 

As Forbes.com reported in this story, the recommended inclusion of the four youth sports is a direct result of sweeping changes IOC president Thomas Bach has implemented as part of his so-called Olympic Agenda 2020, which is aimed at overhauling the Games and broadening its appeal with younger viewers.

The Olympics may be the world’s biggest sports event, but it has struggled to appeal to young people, with NBC’s TV ratings for the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics on NBC down 15 percent from the 2012 London Olympics. And the Rio Games were "the oldest-skewing Olympics going back to 1960, the year the Olympics were first televised here in the U.S. The median age of the Rio Games was 52.4 years, up 6% from London's 49.5 years and up 15% when compared to the 2000 Sydney Olympics (45.5 years)," according to Ad Age, Forbes.com reported.

Ratings for the PBA Tour are up this year with the start of its new deal with FOX Sports, but it still draws far fewer viewers in the prized 18-49 demographic than many sports.

For example, the Feb. 10 Tournament of Champions telecast drew an average of 1,131,000 viewers measured in 15-minute increments, according to ShowBuzzDaily.com. That was up 75.6 percent over the average of 644,000 viewers for the 2018 TOC on ESPN, and was the highest viewership for a regular PBA Tour show since the 2010 Tournament of Champions, which was won in historic fashion by Kelly Kulick, as I detailed in this story.

But only 243,000 of those 1,131,000 viewers were in the 18-49 demographic, which is 21.48 percent.

The Olympics want young viewers because advertisers and sponsors and TV networks want young viewers. And those entities are what drives billions of dollars to the Olympics.

Breakdancing was one of the major success stories of the Youth Olympics in Buenos Aires in 2018, attracting up to 90,000 spectators each day. Russia’s “Bumblebee'”(real name: Sergey Chernyshov) and “Ram” of Japan (real name: Ramu Kawai) became the first ever youth Olympic gold medalists.

“People voted in their thousands there and given what I witnessed I've no doubts that 'breaking' will be a huge success in Paris,” BBC Sport Olympic reporter Nick Hope wrote in his analysis.

In competitive breakdancing, also called breaking, breakers — alone or in teams — face off against each other in "battles," taking turns to show off an array of imaginative, acrobatic and improvised moves to a DJ's beats, watched by a judging panel that picks the winner, the Associated Press reported in this story.

"There's simply no doubt about the athletic aspects of the discipline," Mounir Biba, one of the foremost breakdancers in France, which is a stronghold of the sport, said in fielding numerous questions at the Paris announcement about how breaking qualifies as a sport. "I defy Cristiano Ronaldo to do just one of my movements.”

Organizers noted the proposed sports have broad appeal to young people, large and active audiences on social media and, with skateboarding and breaking in particular, an urban base.

Tony Estanguet, a three-time canoeing Olympic champion and head of the Paris 2024 organizing committee, said the inclusion of the new sports would make the Olympics "more urban" and "more artistic,"  BBC.com reported in this story.

“Right from the beginning, our aim was to offer Games that would have an impact and the element of surprise," Estanguet said in the Forbes story. "This is why we have chosen to present the IOC with four sports that are as creative as spectacular, geared towards youth and completely in line with our vision. We are certain that breaking, skateboarding, sport climbing and surfing will contribute to strengthen our project."

The AP reported that Paris organizers also are aiming to make the 2024 Games more participative than ever, by allowing members of the public to test themselves against the performances of Olympic athletes, in the real world or virtually.

That could include organizing a public marathon on the same route the Olympians run on, and on the same day. Organizers also are exploring connected technology that might allow spectators to virtually compete against Olympians. That could include riding a stationary bike at home and comparing that performance against those of cyclists in the Olympic races.

Paris' proposal is the four sports together enter 248 athletes, evenly split between men and women. That means 248 other positions would need to cut to keep the Olympics under the IOC's new ceiling of 10,500 athletes.

For Tokyo, the 474 new athletes in the five new sports were incorporated separately from the 10,616 total for the full 28 core sports which had already been improved.

From its 2020 effort to its 2024 effort, World Bowling tried to improve in the areas IOC desired, and scheduled the new World Junior Championships for outside Paris March 17-23 to showcase the world’s best youth competitors.

After the Olympics bowling committee’s presentation to the Paris 2024 officials, World Bowling CEO Kevin Dornberger said in my story here that “We came away — all of us — feeling pretty good about the meeting.”

The World Junior Championships originally were set to happen months before the Paris 2024 committee was to make its decision on recommended new sports in June. Dornberger said that decision was moved to March but then was announced Thursday, leaving the tournament unable to make an impact.

Other than saying he was “disappointed,” Dornberger on Thursday afternoon said he didn’t want to comment further until after World Bowling put out its official statement.

World Bowling released this statement early Friday:
"World Bowling learned this morning through an official letter from the Paris 2024 Olympic Organising Committee that the sport of bowling would not be put forward by the host city as one of the proposed new sports to be included in the 2024 Games. Paris 2024 have instead named Breakdancing, Climbing, Surfing and Skateboarding to be their chosen additional sports to go through to the next stage of the process for inclusion at the Olympic Games in 2024.
Where previously the Organising Committee of the Games was given the list of IOC Recognised Sports with which to choose a shortlist of eight sports to proceed in the application process, this cycle’s process differed in that no shortlist was made and that all IOC Recognised Sports were at liberty to proceed in their application with no formal process being determined and no short list being announced.
It is said that approximately 20 IOC recognised sports applied for consideration for inclusion in to the Paris 2024 Olympic Games.
Having previously made the coveted shortlist for the Tokyo 2020 Games, it is with no doubt that World Bowling were very disappointed with today’s announcement.
World Bowling CEO Kevin Dornberger says 'it is with great regret that we learn of this news but we congratulate the four sports that were chosen. Bowling has made a lot of forward movements in the past four years after having come so close to inclusion in the Tokyo 2020 Games. This news should not set us back and only motivate us to continue to improve the sport which we know has so much potential to succeed and entertain the masses.'
A delegation that comprised of four World Bowling members and three French Federation (FFSBQ) members met with Paris 2024 Organising Committee heads in January of this year to present the sport and their vision of what it would look like in the Paris 2024 Olympic Games."

Dornberger on Friday posted these comments on Facebook:
"I have seen the fruits of my labor. Bowling is now generally at least in the public discussion for deserving sports, and more bowling fans are aware of the issues and motivation of the IOC. While it may look like future Olympic sports will be X-Game stuff (and look out, ESports are coming on like a freight train), at least the IOC has a strategy, flawed or not, for their issues. The real problem is that many long-standing Olympic sports are not relevant in today's society, and they block the way for more modern traditional sports. Politics and relationships keep them there; before you damn that think about how much politics and relationships affect pretty much everything.
In the end, all a person can do is what he/she believes is right, and the chips will fall wherever they fall. I'm one ex-lawyer who doesn't believe that every bad thing that happens must have some fault involved. Life happens."

And Dornberger spoke with Bowlers Journal in this story.

The bottom line is if we're real about the situation, bowling’s chances of being included in the Olympics under its current criteria are about as close to zero as they could be.

Kyle Troup and his Afro might be cool and hip and draw some non-traditional media attention from outlets like TMZ, but that does not make bowling itself hip and cool.

Junior Gold may be a hugely successful competition with perhaps 4,000 competitors this year, but that does not make bowling itself hip and cool.

Hundreds of thousands of people can sign petitions supporting bowling in the Olympics, but that does not make bowling itself hip and cool.

Bowling will never look like surfing and skateboarding and rock climbing and breakdancing.

We have more than a century of tradition and history and we’re simply not going to be hip and cool in the way those sports are.

The Olympics are becoming more like the X Games with every passing year, and bowling is as far from an X Games sport as one could imagine.

Based on the evidence, I’d wager that plenty of Olympic sports with long traditions in the games would have zero chance of getting in if they already weren’t in, and didn’t have the political power they have in the Olympic movement.

Should bowling quit trying to get in the Olympics? Of course not — the benefits are too huge if bowling can get in and governments across the globe start investing in building bowling teams the way they invest in building other Olympic teams.

But we also shouldn’t try to be something we’re not and accept that where the Olympics is at now doesn’t fit our great sport. 

Maybe someday the Olympics will value sports for the things it should: wide global participation, relative gender equity, and competitive accessibility to all shapes and sizes.

Then bowling will be in good position.

So long as the Olympics continues to put money in the form of TV ratings, youthful demographics, advertising and sponsors above all else, bowling is just banging its collective head against the Olympic rings.