Tokyo’s sparkling Ariake Gymnastics Centre, the venue for artistic, rhythmic and trampoline gymnastics at the 2020 Games, hosted a hugely successful 2019 Trampoline World Championships, which ended on Sunday with a range of nations securing Olympic qualification and a big, boisterous crowd cheering on Japanese success. 

Sandy Brémond is rapidly making her way to the top of the ski cross world. The 17-year-old champion from the Southern French Alps will be a serious contender at the Youth Olympic Games (YOG) Lausanne 2020, where she will make her Olympic bow and realise the first part of a childhood dream.

A mini-revolution in athletics is underway, with the introduction of a new event onto the Tokyo 2020 Olympic programme: the 4x400m mixed relay. Doha 2019 saw the event make a successful World Championship debut, in which tactics very much came to the fore…

olympic.org picks out some of the most eye-catching performances from former Youth Olympic Games (YOG) athletes in recent weeks, as the YOG continue to provide a springboard to the international stage.

Not for the first time, Simone Biles has lit up the World Artistic Gymnastics Championships. In Stuttgart, she claimed another five world titles to surpass the overall World Championship medal record, men and women combined. Winner of four Olympic golds at Rio 2016, the 22-year-old American now has Tokyo 2020 in her sights. She will be among the most hotly anticipated stars at the Games, where she is looking to add to her gold medal haul in the all-around and apparatus events.

Now seen as the real catalyst for Japan’s rebirth in the 20th century, the Games of the XVIII Olympiad, held in the Japanese capital, drew large crowds to all the competition venues. These Games also enjoyed global success due to the fact that they were the first in history to be broadcast live via satellite. Fifty-six years later, the Games are returning to Tokyo and look set to be just as successful!

Worldwide TV broadcasting by satellite; a big leap for the pole vault with fibre glass poles; and swimming with timing touch pads fixed to the pool walls… But also the last athletics races at the Games on a cinder track – the Games in Tokyo served as a springboard to the future… to the next edition, in 2020!

Sam Kendricks, Armand Duplantis and Piotr Lisek have been the stars of the pole vault season, each surpassing the fabled 6m mark at least once and delivering spectacular performances in the final of the 2019 IAAF World Championships in Doha, in which Kendricks emerged victorious. We can’t wait to see them back in action in Tokyo next year, and they’re not the only ones: the performances of reigning Olympic champion Thiago Braz da Silva from Brazil and world record-holder Renaud Lavillenie from France are also hotly anticipated. 

For the Games of the XVIII Olympiad, Kon Ichikawa directed a film that has gone down in Olympic history. The Japanese filmmaker opted for an artistic approach to showcase the beauty and intensity of sport, its joys and exertions, and the faces of athletes from all over the world, in a lyrical work of stylistic beauty that has left a truly lasting impression.