After missing out on LA 2028, WFDF is looking ahead to the next Summer Olympics in Australia
October 18, 2024 by Charlie Eisenhood in News with 0 comments
Tomorrow, following the gold medal matches of the World Beach Ultimate Club Championships in Portugal, there will be a 4-on-4 game on the showcase pitch. It won’t award a medal and won’t count towards any standings in the event.
The Mixed Division game between France and Spain (a rematch of the 2023 WBUC final), rather, is an exhibition put on by the World Flying Disc Federation to show off what a small-sided beach ultimate game could look like in the Olympics.
After ultimate’s failure to even make the short list for additional sports to be added to the 2028 Los Angeles Summer Olympics, WFDF is pressing on in their quest to land a coveted spot in the biggest international multi-sport event. WFDF President Robert “Nob” Rauch traveled to Australia in March to meet with the Brisbane 2032 Summer Games organizing team. Rauch sat down with CEO Cindy Hook and Director of Sport Brendan Keane to give an initial pitch for ultimate. Each Olympic host nation is now able to select a small number of sports to add specifically for their games, a policy that gave us break dancing and surfing, among other sports, in the Paris Olympics this summer.
“The good news about pursuing the Olympics is that it’s not the end goal,” said Rauch. “It’s a means to the end. If we were to be able to have a showcase at the Olympics, the amount of publicity, the amount of credibility that would be gained, would do phenomenal things for the growth of the sport, not only in countries where we currently are operating, but in many other countries, especially third world countries, where the Olympic sports federations get real, tangible resources. It would provide support to our national federations. So whether we get in or not, the efforts we make are actually not that extraordinarily beyond what we’re already doing outside of a few extra trips, a few extra pitches.”
For LA 2028, WFDF floated the idea of Ultimate 4s, a four-on-four version of ultimate on grass, for which a similar showcase game was created. Because of the Olympics’ cap on the number of athletes that can participate, most team sports aspiring to get into the Games have developed scaled-down versions designed to be played by fewer participants. The idea would be to have 6 or 8 mixed gender teams at the Olympics, each with just eight participants, like ultimate’s World Games rosters (14 players) cut almost in half. For Australia, WFDF is pushing the idea of beach ultimate instead — Brisbane, one hour north of the Gold Coast which just hosted the World Ultimate Championships last month, features world-class beaches and setting up a showcase pitch is easy and inexpensive.
International beach ultimate is typically played as 5-on-5, though there are still prominent beach tournaments, like Wildwood and the Boracay Open, that play a 4v4 format. The WFDF showcase this weekend will keep the 4v4 format on a regulation 5-on-5 field (75x25m) — typically, the field is 46x27m for the smaller-sided game.
The pitch to reduce the athlete quota for the LA 2028 games ultimately did not matter: ultimate was passed over. “I will admit that it was a bit of a gut punch, because I really thought we had a strong chance of at least making the shortlist, even if the prospects for actually making the Olympics were were not as great,” said Rauch, who noted that ultimate checks many of the boxes that the International Olympic Committee has said it is looking for in modern sports to add to the games: a focus on youth, gender equality, and, rare for many sports, mixed gender play.
He noted that Australian Olympic officials might also be excited to add ultimate to their program because the country’s ultimate teams have had a lot of success in international ultimate: the Aussies have claimed medals at the World Games in four of the last five events, including silver in 2022, and the Open and Women’s teams both medaled this summer at the World Ultimate Championships.
While ultimate has a great pitch from the competition side, the economics of the sport are far worse than other sports, including baseball, football, cricket, and lacrosse, which all beat out ultimate to get onto the 2028 program.
“The areas that we need to continue to work on is increasing the exposure we have with spectators in our endemic but, even more importantly, our non-endemic community to be able to gain greater visibility,” said Rauch. “That is a prerequisite for getting further commercial support from non-endemic sponsors to be able to really develop that leg of our revenue model.”
The showcase game on Saturday, October 19, will be streamed live at 12pm eastern on the WFDF YouTube channel, the Ulti.tv YouTube channel, and the Olympic Channel.
