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

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.

“Young people still have an incredible interest in the Olympic Games,” says International Olympic Committee Sports Director Kit McConnell. “But the way they are consuming the Olympic Games—the type of content they are watching and the ways and the platforms on which they are watching—are fundamentally changing.”

Enter Sky Brown, the Anglo-Japanese skateboarder who was named in March to the British Olympic squad. The elementary schooler has already drawn millions of views to internet videos of her fearless, technically advanced skating—an alluring statistic for an event that’s looking to persuade online fans to tune into revenue-earning TV network coverage. “With skateboarding becoming an Olympic sport I think it’s super exciting,” says Brown, who will turn 11 in July. “It’s going to be really cool with people doing super-gnarly tricks, and really fun to watch.”

Part of the challenge is how to present skateboarding and its rule-breaking ethos within the sporting prestige of the centuries-old Olympiad. Take uniforms. While companies have sponsored skate teams in extreme sports competitions such as ESPN’s X-Games, Olympic-style team uniforms haven’t been part of boarding.

“It is what it is,” says Gary Ream, chairman of the World Skate Skateboarding Commission, which is in charge of producing the street and park terrain events at the Tokyo Games. He won’t say what the standards will be for competitors but acknowledges that there will be rules regarding what can be worn. “They will be wearing something showing their team and country,” he says.

The marketing potential of skateboarding hasn’t gone unnoticed by Nike Inc. and Adidas AG, which are looking to capitalize on the sport’s youthful edge and broaden the exposure they’ve gotten by sponsoring the U.S. and U.K. Olympic teams, respectively.

At the Tokyo Games, the Nike and Adidas logos may well predominate at the Aomi Urban Sports Park, a special venue set up for skateboarding and BMX bicycling. Adidas declined to comment, and Nike didn’t respond to emails seeking a response.

Not so for niche skater brands. California-based Vans, now a unit of VF Corp., built a reputation as a supplier of shoes and gear for skateboarders that helped turn it into a multibillion-dollar business. The brand even sponsors a professional tour. But Vans and others like it will struggle to be seen at the Tokyo Games as the Olympic committee works hard to prevent giving exposure to nonsponsoring brands. Ream expects such branding restrictions to apply to individual skateboarders, too.

The inclusion of skateboarding has also raised concerns about drugs, with the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency testing skaters in anticipation of the games. At least one competitor, Cory Scott Juneau, has accepted a six-month suspension after testing positive for the main active ingredient in marijuana, the U.S. agency said in January. “The strength of skateboarding is that it has been a very protected environment, created for kids by kids who have expressed their desires through the sport with no adult intervention,” Ream says. “With the Olympics, you can look at this as now we are entering the adult world.”

There’s already some very adult money in skateboarding. American Tony Hawk, considered the sport’s richest star, has a net worth reported to be as high as $140 million by Money Inc., which featured the 20 richest skateboarders on its website last year. The next wealthiest on the list is Jamie Thomas, also from the U.S., with $50 million.

Hawk and Thomas made most of that money by selling their own branded gear and, in Hawk’s case, video games. Managing their own businesses sets skateboarders apart from many other athletes, who typically take paychecks for representing big global sports brands. Skateboarders “have always figured out how to be on the edge with video and music to promote themselves,” Ream says. “That’s how this sport has grown from its earliest days, with skaters themselves creating their own media.”

Skateboarding competitions involve doing a series of so-called tricks, which can be ideal for short videos that fans can spread fast on social media, says Shawn McBride, executive vice president of sports at Ketchum, a communications and branding house. “That’s been really critical for engagement, and it’s going to continue to be critical,” he says.

McBride says the Olympics is moving especially quickly to increase TV viewer engagement, marketing speak for luring consumers to interact by sharing video clips or personal messages related to an event. Skateboarding offers “snackable” moments, short clips of stunts that grab the attention of users scrolling through social media. These viral videos can help big-spending companies such as NBCUniversal—its parent, Comcast Corp., paid $12 billion for exclusive U.S. broadcast rights to the Olympics through 2032—because the clips can also draw viewers to full-length telecasts and give advertisers more exposure.

At the 2016 Games in Rio, NBC was forced to give advertisers “make goods,” or free commercial time, after providing separate guarantees for TV and online audiences and then coming up short on television viewers. Such promises become daunting as more consumers watch programs both ways. One way NBCUniversal has responded to the pressure is by changing how it counts viewers to include those who watch online in a total it uses to price advertising. Still, the focus on pulling in younger viewers, including those online, is intense.

“We are maniacally focused on the generations to come,” says Jenny Storms, chief marketing officer for NBC Sports Group. “The numbers prove that they are engaged and part of the Olympics, and what we have to ensure is that we are meeting these younger consumers on their platforms of choice.”

The IOC’s earlier attempt to capture young viewers by adding snowboarding in 1998 drew scorn from some of the activity’s purists, who insisted its culture was incompatible with a competition such as the Olympics. But snowboarding became one of the most popular Winter Games events. At Pyeongchang in 2018, a video of American snowboarder Shaun White winning an historic third gold medal on the half-pipe led online coverage of the games, with almost 1 million views on YouTube.

White, who also won gold as a skateboarder at X-Games 17 in 2011, says he’s considering competing for a spot on the U.S. team for Tokyo 2020. The prospect that he could become one of the handful of athletes to win gold medals at both Winter and Summer Games could add to the buzz in Tokyo.

Yet it’s Brown, who was born in Japan and has lived there, who’s creating the most noise in the runup to the games. If the British team qualifies, she’ll be 12 when she competes in Tokyo. “I am super excited about skating and surfing finally becoming an Olympic sport,” says Brown, who currently lives in California and says she wakes at 5 a.m. so she can go surfing before school. “It makes me really happy to know that I’m inspiring people. It’s just really cool to see more girls skating.”

Organizers of the games are hoping viewers will agree. Yet even if skateboarding doesn’t bring younger viewers back, it won’t be the end of the Olympic Committee’s search for street cred: The 2024 Olympics in Paris is considering adding a medal competition for break dancing.

©2019 Bloomberg L.P.