30 greatest one-time sports in Summer Olympics history

4. Karate
2020 Tokyo Olympics

Fast forwarding quite a few decades, we have karate in the 2020 (which occurred in 2021) Olympics. It’s incredibly rare to have a one-time sport in today’s era of the Olympics. If the IOC makes a decision on a sport, they will usually give them at least two iterations of the Games before cutting them loose. That wasn’t the case for karate.

Head-to-head combat has been a part of the Olympics since their Greek upbringing, but karate seemed like a no brainer with how popular it is worldwide. However, it was not in the program until the Olympics went to Tokyo. 

Organizers used the Kumite rulebook, which called on karate practitioners to compete in an 8×8 area. The goal was to outstrike your opponent in a three-minute period. The points are calculated after each round. If someone is winning by eight points during the match, they win automatically. The first point is incredibly important, as it will be used as the tiebreaker if both competitors finish with the same amount of points. Competitors get points from clean kicks or punches. There was also a kata competition for both men and women, which is a judge-based karate presentation.

At the end of the day, karate was just not as exciting as judo or taekwondo. It comes off as formulaic or even too boring.