Lausanne, Switzerland, March 4, 2020: The Executive Board of the International Olympic Committee made two key decisions on Wednesday to draw even more attention to gender equality at the Olympic Games, starting with Tokyo 2020.
“The Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 will be the first gender-balanced Olympic Games in history with 48.8 per cent women’s participation,” said IOC President Thomas Bach.
“Today, the IOC EB also decided that there should be – for the first time ever – at least one female and one male athlete in every one of the 206 teams and the IOC Refugee Olympic Team participating at the Games of the Olympiad.
“Additionally, we have also changed the rules to allow National Olympic Committees to nominate a female and a male athlete to jointly bear their flag during the Opening Ceremony. We encourage all National Olympic Committees to make use of this option.
“With these two initiatives, the IOC is sending another extremely strong message to the world that gender balance is a reality at the Olympic Games,” Bach stressed.
The EB ratified the principle of working with the International Federations (IFs) to allocate a limited number of additional quota places to NOCs that have not managed to qualify, or secured a tripartite invitation place, for a minimum of one man and one woman for the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020.
London 2012 marked the first time that all NOCs had managed to include at least one female athlete in their delegation in the history of the Games: Brunei, Saudi Arabia and Qatar all had female athletes as part of their delegations for the first time ever.
However, no edition of the Olympic Games has enjoyed the landmark of having all 206 NOCs represented by at least one male and one female athlete together in their delegations.
Source: www.olympic.org