Olympic sailing had a problem — and a deadline.

It took nearly a century for sailing to hold an Olympic event for women. At the 1988 Games in Seoul, an American pair walked away with the first women’s sailing gold medal, in the double-handed 470 class. In the years since, sailing has continued to lag behind most other sports at the Games in gender parity.

Pressured by mandates from the International Olympic Committee to have an equal number of male and female athletes at the 2020 Tokyo Games, World Sailing added more roster spots in women’s events to reach that goal. And then the organization voted last fall for full gender equity — in the number of athletes and the number of medals — for the 2024 Olympics in Paris.

Sailing, which in 2020 will award two more medals to men than women, attained equity for 2024 in part by adding races that had not been part of the sport before: a mixed two-person offshore race and a mixed kiteboarding relay.

“If you want to be relevant in the future, you have to get the gender balances right,” Kim Andersen, World Sailing’s president, said in November. “In sailing we have to be interesting to youth and bring up the level of mixed sport.”