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Chananya De Ruiter
13 Aug 2021
Delayed for a year due to the pandemic, the 2020 Tokyo Olympics made history with many firsts. According to the International Olympics Committee, 49 percent of the athletes competing were women, making the 2020 Tokyo Games the most equal and gender-balanced Olympics ever. Full of inspirational victories by barrier-breaking athletes, here are more history-making events that took place at the Olympics:
Jamaican sprinter Elaine Thompson-Herah set an Olympic record and a Jamaican national record of 10.61 seconds in the 100 meters at the Tokyo Games—a place no woman has been before.
Dutch runner Sifan Hassan won the gold medal in the 5000 meters and 10,000 meters, and the bronze medal in the 1500 meters, becoming the only athlete in history to medal at these events in the same Olympic Games.
Anna Kiesenhofer of Austria became her nation’s first cycling Olympic gold medalist.
In women’s triathlon, Flora Duffy won the first gold medal for Bermuda, making it the smallest country to win an Olympic gold medal ever.
Badminton duo Greysia Polii and Apriyani Rahayu became the first to bring back an Olympic gold medal to their country Indonesia.
Filiphino weightlifter Hidilyn Diaz won the women’s 55kg and became her country’s first Olympic gold medalist.
The first athlete to represent an independent Turkmenistan, Polina Guryeva won a silver medal in weightlifting.
Brother and sister from Japan, Abe Hifumi and Uta became the first siblings to win golds in judo at the same Games.
Jun Mizutani and Mima Ito from Japan became the first non-Chinese players to win gold in table tennis since 2004.
Skateboarding, a sport new to the Olympics, has the youngest Olympic participants ever. Twelve-year-old Kokona Hiraki won a silver medal in the park portion of the competition, becoming the youngest Japanese athlete on record to participate and earn a medal in the Olympics. She is followed by bronze medalist Sky Brown from Great Britain, who just turned 13 before the Games. Just a few days earlier, Japan’s 13-year-old skateboarder Momiji Nishiya was the youngest person ever to win a gold medal for Japan.
Japan’s Yuto Horigome was the first person ever to win a gold medal in skateboarding.
This Olympic had a few openly transgender athletes, notably New Zealander weighlifter Laurel Hubbard, however, it was single-named Canadian footballer Quinn who became the first openly transgender athlete to win a gold medal in the Games’ history.
At only 18 years old, Anastasija Zolotic became the first American woman to win Olympic gold in the Korean sport of Taekwondo.
US fencer Lee Kiefer became the first American woman to win a gold medal in individual foil.
American Olympian Carissa Moore became the first woman to win a gold medal in surfing, a sport which just became included in the Games this year.
Not only did Tamyra Mensah-Stock take gold for the second time in Team USA’s women’s wrestling history, but she also became the first Black woman to win a wrestling gold.
The first Hmong gymnast to represent the US Olympics team is all-around gold-medalist Suni Lee.
Twenty-year-old Will Shaner won the USA's first gold in the men’s 10-meter air rifle sport.
The US’ Katie Ledecky made her mark as the first woman swimmer to earn six gold medals in her career.
Krysta Palmer, 29, became the first American woman to earn a medal in an individual diving event in 21 years, while Jessica Parratto and Delaney Schnell became the first US team to medal in women’s synchronized diving (from a 10m platform), winning silver in the competition.
As the mixed relay race made its Olympic debut at Tokyo, men and women swam the same race in another Olympic first.
Archery, another new event at this year’s Olympics, was won by South Korea’s mixed archery team.
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