After failing to win admittance to the last five Summer Olympics, surfing on Wednesday could be anointed a new sport at the 2020 Tokyo Games.

But don’t expect surfers of the world to unite in celebration. “Surfing is too cool for the Olympics,” said former professional surfer Corky Carroll, arguing that surfers don’t belong in any club that includes the likes of synchronized swimmers.

Any time a new sport enters the Olympics there are naysayers. But as the International Olympic Committee prepares on Wednesday to approve five new sports to debut at the Tokyo Games, an extraordinary degree of ambivalence, even hostility, is brewing within two of them—surfing and skateboarding.

“Skateboarding is not a ‘sport’ and we do not want skateboarding exploited and transformed to fit into the Olympic program,” says an online petition addressed to Thomas Bach, president of the IOC. The petition has gained nearly 7,000 of 10,000 hoped-for signatures.

These opponents represent something more than a fringe element. Last year, Surfer magazine asked a nine-person panel of surfers, historians, writers and editors where they stood on surfing’s candidacy as an Olympic sport. Four supported it, four opposed it and one was undecided.