In the just-concluded 2024 Paris Olympic Games, the four newly added events, namely, skateboarding, surfing, sport climbing and breaking, grabbed the spotlight. These new Olympic events have long been held in Qingdao, attracting more and more young people to explore the charm of sports.

On blistering days in August, little members of the Qingdao skateboarding team, with beads of sweat falling down from their cheeks, rise high into the air time and time and fall hard on the ground in the skatepark of Qingdao Huiquan Square. Young people in Qingdao started skateboarding in late 1980s. In the first China Open Championship for Skateboarding held in 1994, contestants from Qingdao won many prizes. Nowadays Qingdao is home to more than 500 professional skaters. To make skateboarding reach out to more people, Yuan Fei, one of the earliest skateboarding athletes in Qingdao, have begun to commentate on skateboarding and extreme sports events. During the Paris Olympic Games, Yuan Fei commentated on the skateboarding competition on Migu.

Qingdao, where the sole surfing site in northern China, namely the Stone Old Man Bathing Beach, is located, therefore enjoys particularly favorable natural conditions to develop surfing. Up to 1,000 citizens and tourists come to experience the fun of surfing between May and October every year. The Qingdao Surfing Team, founded in 2019, founded as late as 2019, have so far won five national championships.

Breaking clubs in Qingdao are where innumerable young breakers come from. More than 300 professional breakdancers receive training in the breaking training base of Qingdao Second Stadium. China DanceSport Federation selected 40 athletes for a training camp prior to the imminent Paris Olympic Games, five of whom came from the Qingdao Breaking Team.

Sport climbing sites, which dot residential quarters and campuses, find enormous favor with youngsters. To carry forward this sport on a long term, Qingdao has spent 5 million in funding to build professional climbing facilities. In the newly-concluded China middle school students sport climbing tournament, students from Qingdao clinched six gold medals and won the first prize for total group scores in both the two groups for male senior middle school students.  (Xu Nuo)