Skateboarding in the Olympics

ABU DHABI -- Watching Shaun White throw down in the men's halfpipe in Vancouver, you had to wonder, for perhaps the gazillionth time: why isn't skateboarding in the Summer Games?

Lots of reasons, actually, all of them having to do with the International Olympic Committee's politics and policies, but then there's this -- the IOC is purportedly on a quest to connect with young people, and young people like skateboarding. Like, a lot.

"It should be [in the Games] immediately," Tony Hawk, the skateboarding pioneer, said here Wednesday in an interview ahead of the Laureus awards, Hawk having now achieved such standing in his professional and charitable works that he's one of the 46 members of the Laureus academy.

Which, along with his enormous street cred and financial acumen, gives him license to speak even more frankly: "As far as the Summer Games go, the Olympics needs skateboarding more than skateboarding needs them -- as far as getting a cool factor.

"You see what snowboarding has done in the Winter Olympics. Skateboarding could do the exact same thing for the Summer Olympics."

Yes, it could. So, again -- why isn't skateboarding in the Games?

Because the IOC has its ways, and those ways are complicated.

To get onto the Olympic program is a long and arduous process. Golf and rugby were admitted last October to the program for the Rio 2016 Games. Baseball and softball tried to get back on but didn't cut it.

Roller sports -- which would have been one way for skateboarding to get in -- similarly didn't make the 2016 cut.

An end-around now might be for skateboarding to come in not as a "sport" but as a "discipline" under the umbrella of one of the sports that has one of the 28 places on the Summer Games program. Say, for instance, cycling.

But the conflict there is patent -- much as the cycling authorities, just to continue the thought, might like to have control over skateboarding, why would skateboarding officials cede that authority (and financial direction) to anyone else, particularly someone who might not understand their sport and culture as well as they do?

Hawk professed optimism.

"There is a movement gaining momentum about getting skateboarding into the Olympics," he said. "The skateboarding industry is actually pro-actively getting other countries involved, getting them to have their own governing organizations, holding an annual world championships, sort of jumping through all the hoops the IOC requires.

"I can see it happening. The earliest tould be Rio."

A lot of tricks would have to happen for that to happen.

Then again, Shaun White threw a revolutionary trick in Vancouver to cement gold, that Double McTwist 1260 -- three and a half spins while doing two flips.

Guess who was there watching? Tony Hawk. And it says here the IOC needs more of that gotta-be-there, don't-want-to-miss-the-moment feeling in the Summer Games.

"I went to see Shaun," he said. "That's why I went."