Dakar 2026 Youth Olympics: How To Watch And Who To Watch

Africa has opened its first ever Olympic Games as Senegalese President Bassirou Diomaye Faye declared the Dakar 2026 Youth Olympic Games open on Saturday night at the 55,000-capacity Abdoulaye Wade Stadium in Diamniadio, with IOC President Kirsty Coventry in attendance.

More than 1,000 performers took part in the opening ceremony, which included the presence of two Senegalese teenagers, fencer Abdourahmane Marième Sy and judoka Aïcha Diop, to light the cauldron with the Olympic flame as it concluded its journey on African soil for the first time.

The Games were first awarded for 2022 and pushed back four years by the pandemic, with dates being further pushed back due to delays in preparations. Having opened on October 31st, they now run until November 13. Here is what is on, when to watch it from the US, who to follow and what it all costs.

Dakar 2026 at a glance

Around 2,655 athletes aged 14 to 17 are competing, representing 204 national teams. There are 153 medal events across 25 sports, plus 10 “engagement” sports where young people can try disciplines without medals on the line.

Dakar is the first Youth Olympics with full gender parity, with 1,350 quota places each for boys and girls, and it is also the first Youth Games to include a Refugee Olympic Team, with six athletes competing in athletics, judo and taekwondo.

Competition is split across three hubs. Dakar hosts athletics, swimming, futsal and the urban sports, Diamniadio, a new city about 20 miles from the capital, has the main stadium and the athletes’ village, while the beach resort of Saly, on Senegal’s Petite Côte, hosts beach sports, rowing and triathlon.

Two sports are making their Youth Olympic debut. Baseball5, a five-a-side street version of baseball that needs no bats or gloves, opened competition on October 30th, a day before the opening ceremony. Wushu taolu, a Chinese martial art judged on routines, is also making its debut. Street skateboarding, break dancing, beach wrestling and coastal rowing sprints round out a programme built with a younger audience in mind in terms of both participation and viewing.

How to watch the Dakar 2026 Youth Olympic Games

US viewers have two routes, and one of them is free for users. NBC Olympics holds the US rights, and Peacock is streaming selected sessions live.

Peacock’s listings for the first week include boys’ and girls’ rugby sevens from November 1st to 3rd. They also include the beach volleyball gold medal matches at 8:55 a.m. ET and the men’s street skateboarding final at 11 a.m. ET, both on Wednesday, November 4th.

The free option is Olympics.com, the official Olympics app and the Olympic Channel. They stream the Games worldwide with English commentary and no territorial restrictions. Selected sessions are also on the official Olympics YouTube channel.

Senegal stays on GMT all year, so Dakar is five hours ahead of the East Coast and eight ahead of the West Coast, meaning that morning sessions in Dakar land before dawn in New York. Evening finals, such as the 200m finals at 5:30 p.m. local time, arrive around lunchtime ET.

Team USA has a small squad of around 29 athletes, well below the numbers sent by France and other European nations.

Athletes to watch at Dakar 2026

The Youth Olympics have a strong record of producing future stars. Noah Lyles won 200m gold at Nanjing 2014 before becoming Olympic 100m champion in Paris, and Julien Alfred followed the same path from the Youth Games to Olympic gold.

The host nationSenegal has its biggest hopes in 3×3 basketball player Néné Sira Diallo and men’s beach wrestler Ablaye Diouf, both picked out by the IOC as leading home athletes.

Beyond Senegal, six athletes in Dakar competed at Paris 2024 when they were between 13 and 15 years old. They include France’s skateboarder Lucie Schoonheere and swimmers Dhinidhi Desinghu of India and Marouane Mamane Hamissou Abba of Niger, who are the first from their countries to swim at both the Olympics and the Youth Olympics.

Athletics runs from November 8th to 10th at the 8,000-capacity Iba Mar Diop complex. Tyra Fenton of Antigua and Barbuda won three medals at this year’s CARIFTA Games at the age of 15. France’s Julie Bourgis arrives as European under-18 pole vault champion, and Mexico’s Kendra Silvery Duany won shot put and discus gold at the NACAC under-18 championships.

Among the coastal sports, Nigeria’s 16-year-old beach volleyball captain Joy Lawrence is one of the African names to follow in Saly. In triathlon, Switzerland’s Kimey Casanova took bronze at the junior world championships in Spain, while Tunisia’s Youssef Slama has already won a race on the Saly course. Argentine swimmer Cecilia Dieleke was her country’s most decorated athlete at the South American Youth Games.

The money

Senegal’s 2026 budget puts about €138 million ($156 million) into the Games’ infrastructure programme, according to AFP and carried by France24. The French Development Agency has added an €80 million ($90 million) loan to renovate the Iba Mar Diop stadium, Dakar’s Olympic pool and the Samba Diery Diallo equestrian site, and to build local sports facilities.

The total cost is disputed, however, as Mamadou Diagna Ndiaye, president of the organising committee, told Le Soleil the budget is fully secured and public, and rejected reports that it has reached 80 billion CFA francs (€122 million, $138 million).

The government has also spent on its own team as the sports ministry set aside 1 billion CFA francs (€1.5 million, $1.7 million) to prepare Senegalese athletes, and 328 of them shared 157.44 million CFA francs (€240,000, $271,000) in scholarships for 2025.

The IOC’s own contribution runs through Olympic Solidarity, which has allocated $19.5 million (€17.3 million) to youth development programmes for 2025 to 2028, with a particular focus on African national committees.

The sponsors of Dakar 2026

The IOC’s top-tier sponsors usually save their budgets for the main Olympics, but the arrival of the Games in Africa through Dakar means some are using a youth event as a way into a new market.

Visa is the clearest case as on October 27th it said it would open an office in Dakar by the end of the year to work with Senegalese banks, regulators, fintechs and merchants. It has Games activation centers based in two fan zones in Dakar and Saly built around card acceptance and local merchant sales. Visa has been an Olympic partner since 1986, and its own announcement describes Dakar as its first locally-focused Olympic program in Africa.

Samsung is targeting the athletes themselves as the IOC is giving every competitor a Samsung Galaxy Z Flip8, the first time phones have been handed out at a Youth Olympics. Alibaba Cloud runs the core IT for the Games, and Allianz is promoting that it already serves customers in 25 African countries through its SanlamAllianz joint venture.

The strong involvement of sponsors is good news for the IOC given that five sponsors in its TOP program for core sponsors left after Paris 2024 and only TCL joined, meaning a drop in TOP revenue to $560 million (€473 million) in 2025 from $871.5 million in 2024, according to SportBusiness.

This article was originally published on Forbes.com