Australian surfer Sally Fitzgibbons believes there will be a major change to women’s surfing when action restarts following the COVID-19 lockdown. As the sport gears up for its historic Olympic debut, she and her peers are ready to bring aerials to the fore.

As at the Summer Games Tokyo 2020, a large number of the new events on the programme of the next winter edition, in Beijing in 2022, are mixed. After biathlon, Alpine skiing, figure skating and curling, there will soon be exciting competitions featuring mixed teams in snowboarding, freestyle skiing, short-track speed skating and ski jumping!

Olympic.org looks ahead to the next Olympic Winter Games and speaks to one of the star performers at the Winter Youth Olympic Games (YOG) Lausanne 2020 about her expectations for Beijing 2022.

Olympic sport today looks very different to when the Games were revived by Pierre de Coubertin at the end of the 19th century. The competitors are fitter and stronger. The equipment and venues are more technologically advanced. And gone are events such as tug of war and underwater swimming, replaced by modern, youthful disciplines like BMX and 3x3 basketball. 

France’s Perrine Laffont kicked off the women’s freestyle skiing events at PyeongChang 2018 by claiming moguls gold, before Cassie Sharpe of Canada won the halfpipe title. Sarah Hofflin and Mathilde Gremaud made it a Swiss one-two in the slopestyle and Hanna Huskova of Belarus prevailed in the aerials competition. The competition ended with Canada’s Kelsey Serwa topping the podium in ski cross.

Canadian moguls master Mikael Kingsbury finally ended his quest for Olympic gold, while the USA’s David Wise retained his halfpipe crown. Norway’s Øystein Braaten reigned supreme in the slopestyle, another Canadian, Brady Leman prevailed in the ski cross and Oleksandr Abramenko won the aerials to give Ukraine just its third ever Winter Olympic gold.