The 2024 Paris Olympics are underway and athletes are competing in more than 30 sports, including breaking, which makes its debut this year.
Advocates of jump rope say why not add their sport to the games?
It’s a good question when you consider 62 countries, and roughly 300,000 athletes around the world compete in the sport.
At the forefront of the Olympic jumping quest is Shaun Hamilton.
Hamilton coaches the The King Firecrackers, a group of 20 or so middle schoolers. He says when he was about their age jumping saved his life. He recounts being an African-American student at a new school in Sweetwater, Texas, attending special education classes and desperate to hide a severely pronounced stutter.
Until, he says, he got his hands on a jump rope.
"I was headed towards this classroom to prison pipeline, switched schools, got to jump rope and not only did I graduate high school, I graduated from college, I got my master's degree, and I doing my PhD right now," he said.
Today, Hamilton teaches sports ethics at the University of Dayton and holds several national, international and world titles for rope skipping. He is the co-founder and president of the International Jump Rope Union — the global governing body for jump rope competition — and he’s traveled throughout the U.S. and Europe advocating for he sport.
"You got to know who to talk to," he said. "And you really have to understand what your sport means in the global scale and global spectrum, right? You really have to be able to articulate what your sport is, the value that it brings, and is your sport unique?"
That’s a lot of what the International Olympic Committee is looking in a sport. And along the way, Hamilton has found supporters.
Laurent Petrynka, president of the International School Sport Federation, believes jump rope meets the IOC standards.
"It seems to me as a very modern sport, very joyful, very spectacular, very acrobatic, very impressive. So when you analyze this sport itself it gives a lot of possibilities to one day become an Olympic sport," he said.
Petrynka said it certainly meets the requirement of being a school sport with national and international level competitions.
Veteran sports broadcaster Dan Patrick thinks jump roping will appeal to a younger demographic and people will be surprised at just how big the sport is.
"The number of countries that are really, really good at this and it's very, very important to them," Patrick said. "I think that's what the Olympics are all about, giving people a chance to do something on the biggest stage in the world."
The sportscaster stops just short of calling the sport’s entry into the Olympics inevitable.
"Endurance is in there, jumping, timing, syncopation, you know, so there's a degree of difficulty there that I don't think people are aware of," he said. "And I think it really presents itself well on TV, that people will get excited to watch this. And that's what the Olympics wants. They want people watching."
One athlete to watch is 18-year-old Dylan Wang. He is the team captain for the Mason Comet Skippers and has been jumping for about 10 years. In 2019, he was the youngest Comet Skipper to compete at the world championships in Norway.
"It's just been really cool to see, like, how the sport has been, like, growing, throughout the years," he said. It's becoming more unified, which has been something really cool to see.
Wang said jumping has no limits where creativity is concerned.
"I've been watching Dance Moms and I see a dance move and I'm like, 'Oh my gosh, that's so cool. Let me try to jump it,' and like about like 80% of the time it happens, it works," he said. "You can do literally anything. You can add as many people as you want into a jump rope, with as many ropes as you want. I almost always see new things."
And he’s excited for the prospect of jumping as an Olympic athlete.
"I would love to be there. I love to help out," Wang said. "Or if possible, I can jump. But that's something I'm really exciting."
But it’ll be a few years before that happens. The events for the 2028 summer games in L.A. have already been chosen. Shaun Hamilton thinks the 2032 games in Brisbane, Australia, will be jump rope's best shot to make it to the Olympic stage.
Until then, he’ll keep advocating for the sport that turned his life around and that he believes can help others.
"I love the sport, I love doing this. I'll always do it. I'll always be a part of the sport because I know what it's done for me. And there's so many 'me's' that are out there. Give them a rope, give them hope," he said.
