Can This 10-Year-Old Girl Save the Olympics?

The Olympic Games have long been among the world’s premier marketing events, with hundreds of millions of people worldwide tuning in to watch the human drama as athletes from more than 200 nations compete for the gold. Yet this decidedly mass-market broadcast event has been losing younger viewers, who increasingly spend time on social media and online entertainment. So organizers of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics are counting on skateboarding to help bring back millennials as fans, and it may be a 10-year-old girl who steals the show.

With key measures of television audiences down from 2008 levels and interest among the key youth demographic waning—viewership among 18- to 35-year-olds fell at least 25% for the 2016 Rio Games from four years earlier—organizers of the 2020 Games have added skateboarding as a medal event for the first time. Youth-friendly surfing and sport climbing will join the games as well.