As the eyes of the sporting world turn to host city Paris, extra focus will fall on the hundreds of children competing at the 2024 Olympic Games.
While some sports — including diving, gymnastics, wrestling and boxing — have minimum ages for when athletes can take part, others, such as skateboarding, surfing and table tennis, have no restrictions.
Skateboarding, which made its Olympics debut at the Tokyo Games in 2021 (delayed a year because of the Covid-19 pandemic), attracts a particularly young field, with Finland’s Heili Sirvio and Hasegawa Mizuho of Japan, who are 13, and Zheng Haohao, a Chinese athlete who is just 11 years old, appearing in the French capital.
So what are the rules on under-18s performing at the Games? How do these differ between various sports? Where do these children stay and how are they looked after?
What is the minimum age requirement for the Olympics?
There is no specific age limit to compete at the Games. Age restrictions are set by the international federations in charge of each sport, rather than the International Olympic Committee (IOC).
Arguably the most famous performance by a child at the Olympics was Romanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci receiving a series of perfect 10 scores from the judges at the 1976 Montreal Games when she was 14.
Comaneci was 14 when received a perfect score at the 1976 Olympics (AFP via Getty Images)
Several Olympic sports have no age restrictions, at either end of the scale. In skateboarding at these Games, for example, Great Britain & Northern Ireland have 16-year-olds Sky Brown and Lola Tambling competing alongside Andy Macdonald, who turns 51 next week.
However, for most other sports, there is a minimum age. For example, female gymnasts must now be at least 16 — and there have been growing calls for that to be raised to 18, in line with their male equivalents — while divers must be at least 14, as was the case with Team GB’s Tom Daley at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, China. In judo, it’s 14, and in wrestling it’s 18.
In boxing, the minimum age is 19 and the maximum is 39. Special permission was given to Finland’s Mira Potkonen who was 40 in Tokyo after the Olympics were delayed by a year due to the pandemic. She went on to finish third in the women’s lightweight category, becoming the oldest boxer to win a medal at the Games.
The men’s football event is essentially an under-23s competition, but each 18-strong squad is allowed three overage members.
In the UK, athletes have to be at least 20 for marathons/race-walking and 18 to take part in throwing events, the heptathlon and decathlon and the 10,000m. Athletes as young as 16 can appear in other track events so long as they have “demonstrated a consistent level of performance, as well as previous experience at major international competition, which suggests that selection for senior competition is appropriate for their long-term development”.
In Paris, this is set to include 17-year-old Phoebe Gill in the women’s 800m. She could become the youngest British track athlete at an Olympics for more than 40 years.
How are child athletes protected at the Games?
At the Tokyo Olympics, the IOC brought in chaperones for under-16 athletes.
This time, the IOC is encouraging each national team to have a safeguarding officer and is offering two extra accreditations for welfare officers.
Athletes aged under 18 are allowed to stay at the Olympic Village, home to around 10,000 competitors across the Games, situated in the Saint-Denis area of northern Paris, near the Stade de France. However, whether they actually do so is down to each individual country.
Athletes under 18 will have to pair up with a buddy when they walk around the Olympic Village (Maja Hitij/Getty Images)
Scott Field, director of communications for Team GB, explained how careful attention is being paid to who their youngest athletes share a room with.
“We have a welfare plan that dictates how sports should manage where and who athletes room with, in the Olympic Village or other accommodation,” Field told The Athletic. “Under-16s would have a chaperone with them, who must also accompany them when outside of the Olympic Village/their satellite accommodation.
“We have an extensive welfare guide that supports young people in their stay at the Olympics. We also have a dedicated group of designated safeguarding officers who are on hand to provide welfare support throughout the Games.”
Australia has decided the three youngest athletes in its 460-strong team — Arisa Trew and Chloe Covell, both 14, and 15-year-old Ruby Trew, who are all skateboarders — will stay in a hotel rather than the athletes’ village, UK newspaper The Guardian has reported.
Those under-18s who are in the Olympic village will not share a bedroom with an adult. The apartments will have a supervisor, and the under-18s will have to pair up with a buddy when they walk around the athletes’ village. They will have a supervisor with them for any trips outside the village (requiring consent from parents), or they can be checked out by their parents.
The IOC added this year’s Olympics will have “the most comprehensive package of mental health and safeguarding tools, initiatives and services than any other sporting or Olympic event in history”. This includes having more than 160 accredited welfare officers from 87 national Olympic committees at the Games, a new AI-powered monitoring service to protect athletes from online hate, and two safeguarding officers in the Olympic Village.
What concerns has this led to?
In recent years, sexual-abuse cases, doping scandals and faking ages have shone a light on the concerns around the exploitation of child athletes.
This was seen most recently with the doping case involving Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva, who was 15 when she won gold at the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing. It emerged she had previously tested positive for trimetazidine, a heart medication banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), and Valieva received a four-year ban, backdated to her positive result in December 2021.
Her young age fuelled a debate as to why only she had been punished, and not the Russian doctors who gave her the drugs. The Court of Arbitration for Sport revealed Valieva had been given 56 different medications and supplements between the ages of 13 and 15.
Travis Tygart, the United States’ anti-doping chief, said the number of medications given to her was “sickening”. Olivier Niggli, the director general of the WADA, described it as “shocking”, and said Valieva was “sacrificed” to protect those responsible.
Valieva won gold in Beijing but was later banned for four years (Lintao Zhang/Getty Images)
Under WADA’s code, under-16s are “protected persons”, which means they are subjected to lighter penalties, adding to the fears around exploitation.
Valieva’s case led to the International Skating Union raising the minimum age for athletes in its most high-profile competitions from 15 to 17, a change that would be phased in over three years before the next Winter Olympics in Italy in early 2026.
Meanwhile, the U.S. gymnastics sex abuse scandal saw Larry Nassar, a former doctor for USA Gymnastics, convicted and sentenced to over 300 years in prison in 2018 after being accused of abuse by more than 250 athletes, including four-time Olympic gold medallist Simone Biles. In the UK, a report into gymnastics in 2022 found there had been an epidemic of abuse, which included young athletes being starved and made to hang from the rings used in one of the sport’s events as punishment.
Going further back, X-ray bone analysis in 2009 revealed 3,000 young Chinese athletes had faked their ages — giving them an unfair advantage in competition.
Former WADA deputy director general Rob Koehler is now director general of Global Athlete, a group that has concerns about children competing at the Olympics at all.
“If you look at the Valieva case, it clearly indicated that young kids should not be going to the Games,” Koehler told The Athletic. “In any other professional sport, and this is professional sport, there are age limits — for example, in the NHL (the top ice-hockey league in the U.S. and Canada), before you can be drafted. They should use the Youth Olympics for youth athletes. That’s where there’s extra attention, time spent on education and time spent on culture.
“The WADA code also treats under-16s differently. That alone means you lose all the harmonisation and the quality.
“Do you want a 15-year-old child to have that much pressure on them at the Olympic Games? It’s a tough place to be.
“We think there needs to be age limits and they should be put in straight away.”
(Top photo: Skateboarder Zheng Haohao will compete in the Paris Olympics at age 11; He Canling/Xinhua via Getty Images)
