Or - How will SUP fit into the Olympic Games?
Welcome to my blog where I usually talk about my training performance, but not this month. As I watched the recent ISA World SUP Championships, the question of the Olympic Games came up more than once and that got me thinking…
Should SUP be an Olympic Sport?
Now I guess almost everyone who reads this would answer “Of course!” and that makes for a very short conversation. I do not necessarily agree that is the correct answer so I decided to look at the question another way. How will SUP fit into the Olympics?
To answer that I need to break the question down into components, starting with
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| The author, racing in 2016. Image Credit - That Camera Man |
What is SUP Racing?
It is more than paddling a SUP fast. SUP Racing is a part of the sport we love that is defined by sets of rules. Internationally, those rules are currently set by three (or more?) organisations: the ISA, the ICF and the APP.
Nationally there are yet more ‘governing bodies’ that set their own rules. This leads to inconsistent race formats which, for a sport that is not included at Olympic level is fine but, to step up to the Olympics, the sport needs to standardise rules for racing, if only to allow future SUP Olympians the opportunity to prepare for their attempts to win that elusive Gold medal.
Broadly speaking SUP Racing comprises 4 disciplines. These are Long Distance, Distance, Technical and Sprint. Each with its own set of rules.
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| The 11 Cities non-stop! Image credit @sup11citytour |
Long Distance Racing is exactly that and there are many, long-established events that are truly long-distance races. The 11 Cities SUP Tour in both non-stop and the stage race format is probably the best known and at over 200km is certainly a long race, the Yukon challenge, Alabama 650, Ocean crossings in Hawaii and more. These events challenge the best paddlers in the world.
Distance Racing is the more accessible race format that is used all around the world. Distance races are usually between 10 and 20km long and can be point-to-point or with the start and finish in the same place. Courses vary from one long route a series of laps to make the distance.
This is the format used by classic races including the Carolina Cup, The Very Flat race in the Alps and all of the very successful EuroTour events. This is also the format used at both the ISA and ICF World Championships and for APP Tour races.
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| The author running in a technical race in Sweden. Image Credit Swedish SUP Racing. |
Technical Racing, or the beach race is shorter, faster and usually more exciting than the distance race. The format for the tech race has been almost standardised over the years, paddlers will start on land with their boards, run to the water and then paddle laps of a W shaped course with multiple turns and a section of running on the beach mid-lap with their board. They will then finish with a run to the finish line, usually leaving their board in the water but carrying their paddle. But as with Sprint racing there are differences in course formats with on-water starts and finishes and no running the most usual.
Sprint Racing. This is by far the most variable race format and in recent years World Championship events have featured
- Start and finish on land with an out and back course including one 180-degree turn.
- Start on the water and paddle 100m in a straight line.
- Start on water and paddle 200m in a straight line.
- Start on water and paddle to a buoy, 180-degree turn and finish on water, or land.
There may well be more formats that are used, training as a dedicated Sprint racer must be a challenge.
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| Remco Evenapoel - Olympic Champion. Image Credit IOC / 2024 Getty Images |
What is the Olympic Games?
Easy quesiton! The Olympics are the pinnacle of an athlete’s career, a Gold medal at the Olympics is the ultimate sporting victory.
And for me it is a four-yearly binge watch of sports that I enjoy mixed with an ecletic mix of sports I only watch every 4 years. In recent years the way we can watch the Olympics has changed beyond belief, the ability to watch anything at any time is fantastic! All of swimming and hockey, cycling on road and track and even BMX, which I am too old to enjoy or know anything about but once every 4 years I am an expert. Then handball, shooting archery, beach volleyball... the list goes on. And we can watch as much as we want.
And that shows that the Olymics is much more than 'Sport'. The Olympic Games is the biggest, most expensive, televised sporting event in the world. Massive audiences, massive budgets, massive revenues.
How big is the Olympics?
There are a multitude of stats generated by the Olympics, you can find many of them on the Paris 2024 website (link here), some highlights from their list
- Over 1 million tickets sold for athletics events
- Over 1.08 million spectators for Basketball
- Nearly 500,000 spectators for Handball
- Nearly 450,000 spectators for Beach Volleyball
- On 30 July, around 743,000 spectators attended Paris 2024 events
- Over half of the world’s population is expected to have engaged via broadcast or digital channels with the Olympic Games Paris 2024
Half of the population of the planet!
Now consider the other people needed at each event, all those spectators need volunteers to look after them alongside security, catering, transport, policing outside venues, traffic control and more. The series of events in and around the Olympic city are on a scale that dwarfs every other event in the world, sporting or otherwise.
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| Olympic Media Coverage. Image Credit IOC / Getty Images |
And for broadcasting the stats are also incredible. Just for broadcasting more than 1,000 cameras used to capture the action with more than 3,600 microphones! Over 8,300 people worked to get the Olympics into your homes. That does not include other media or their equipment, there were over 24,000 media accreditations issued for Paris 2024
The Olympics is bigger than sport.
Most of the Olympic Sports have been in the Olympic programme for decades and have well-established formats and audiences, the Olympic organisation and their sponsors can predict the viewing figures for those sports and already know how best to broadcast those sports to the world.
Olympic Sports have rules that are usually well-defined and mature, they do not change very often. Audiences for those sports and, more importantly, commentators understand those rules, they know how each sport functions. And that is important because commentary teams for the Olympic Games may not know much about the sport they are covering, sometimes they cover them once every 4 years.
Money
Money is the driving force behind the modern Olympics and that is not necessarily a bad thing. The result is a sporting spectacle that is enjoyed by billions of people, but it is a reality that needs to be considered.
Knowing your audience is important, it enables the Olympic organises, partners and advertisers to calculate the return on their investment in hosting the games. And that is why the Olympic Games happen, investment and return on investment.
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| Gabriel Medina. Image Credit IOC / Morgan Maassen |
Olympic Inclusion
There are a lot of sports pushing for inclusion in the Olympic programme, we do not need to talk about break dancing! But surfing is a good example that has been added to the Olympic schedule in recent years.
Alongside new sports there are also sports fighting to keep their events included, for example cycling.
In the last few years several Olympic cycling events on the track have been dropped from the schedule in order to balance the events between men and women. Obviously that balance is a great thing which took far too long to achieve but even a sport as huge as cycling could not simply add more events to achieve that balance in the schedule. They had to remove well established events from the men's schedule in order to add for the women. The UCI, the controlling body for cycling world wide, did not have the influence to change the Olympic schedule.
I think the biggest Olympic problem for SUP Racing is the lack of a single organising body.
Maybe there are other sports with multiple, competing organisations in the Games, but I doubt it. It is way past the time when the ISA and ICF should have sat down and sorted out what is best for SUP, not what is best for the ISA or ICF. SUP needs ONE organisation to take the sport forward. I know there is no simple solution for this but why the two governing bodies cannot get together to sort it out is beyond me.
A new Olympic sport therefore has to work with the International Olympic Committe (IOC) to embrace this new, enormous audience and cater for their needs in order to succeed. This means a new sport must work well on screens, be entertaining and easy to understand. And, with more scrutiny on the cost of hosting the Olympic Games new sports will be under some pressure to fit within the infrastructure for the Games.
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| SUP Racing in Sweden, 2019 |
Location, location, location
This is in some ways not a challenge at all, there are already paddle sports in the Olympics and infrastructure for them. The rowing lake. I can already hear the howls of rage from ocean paddlers.
But this is the Olympics, an event bigger than any individual sport and what the SUP Racing community wants might not be what the Olympics will give.
The host city might not be by the ocean, it might not have any water at all or, like Paris 2024 have a fairly polluted river available, get your antibiotics ready paddlers. Or go to the rowing lake which was the alternative location for Open Water Swimming, another 'new' sport for the Olympics that has had to adapt to the Olympic schedule, and location restraints.
Also, part of what makes the Olympics so special is the Olympic spirit, this includes athletes living in the Olympic Village alongside all the other nations. With cardbaord beds! Is the Olympic experience the same for athletes if they are 'in' the Olympics but not 'at' the Olympics?
Exceptions
I appreciate the the 2024 Olympic surfing event was held almost as far from Paris and the Olympic village as it could have been and opposition to that decision was very vocal. It worked, to a point, and generated what might be the best Olympic image of 2024, you know the one. I would be surprised to see this global approach to Olympic location happen again, in future Olympics the hosts will be encouragd to hold events closer together, to minimise costs and to feed into the Olympic spirit that is so important.
Of course there are exceptions to this that have to use distant but close venues, the sailing for example. SUP could simply buddy-up with the sailors although, Olympic sailing needs wind with few waves and that might not be so good for SUP. And at the location SUP would have to give way to sailing, if the sailing competitions were delayed for any reason then how to schedule the SUP race?
Realistically, the easiest option for Olympic inclusion is for SUP to use existing paddle sports locations that already have with the ability to host multiple events and all the equipment needed to broadcast it.
Other challenges for SUP in the Olympics?
The path to the Olympics is likely to be via a test event, maybe in 2032. This is likely to be one race and given there are 4 SUP racing disciplines which should it be?
Long-distance racing will not make the cut for the Olympics. It is not easy to broadcast and harder to organise. And it takes too long for a TV audience to stay with it. Therefore this is the least likely candidate for a test event.
That leaves three disciplines to choose from and that choice will be very difficult.
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| ISA SUP World Championships distance course, Copenhagen |
Distance racing is the part of racing that best represents most paddlers and therefore is a great candidate to represent the sport. But, many of the paddlers wanting SUP to be an Olympic sport also want races to be on the sea in challenging conditions over longer distances, and that might be a problem if the requirement from the Olympic Committee is for a race to fit in existing locations or infrastructure. Those same paddlers who want inclusion will vocally oppose a 10km race doing laps around the rowing lake.
Technical racing is usually exciting! The short nature of the course and multiple laps makes broadcasting easier and the race format suits a live audience cheering on paddlers. The Technicla Race is a great candidate in some ways but again, the purists want the race in ocean conditions. And they are right, the technical race always works best with swell. But if the requirement is to fit in an existing location then there will be howls of complaint if the ‘beach’ race is held at a flatwater location.
Sprint Racing. My process of elimination means I think this is by far the most likely event to be used as a test, a short course, easy to organise, very easy to broadcast with a clear path to the final and winners. Sprint racing could easily be hosted alongside other paddle sports in front of a large live audience.
However… I see a problem
In my opinion, the Technical Race and some versions of Sprint racing have an issue with the rules at turns.
Many will say ‘rubbing is racing’ but I can think of no other sport where shoving a competitor out of the way is permitted or even encouraged. Yet that is what happens in SUP. How could commentators explain that the paddler leading at a turn can be legally pushed out of the way, losing their advantage to finish last?
Yet this is exactly what happened at the ISA World Championships in Denmark in the final of the Elite Women's race, the paddler who got to the turn first finished last after being forced wide by the eventual winner. And they weren't a little bit ahead at the turn, they were a fraction under half a board length ahead, well over 2m.
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| Ready to race |
In what other sport is being the fastest a disadvantage?
As you sit there reading this thinking "How wrong could he be!" remember this, I follow SUP racing, I am familiar with the rules and I understand the implementation of them and that final was within the rules for the event.
But would a global TV audience that has never watched a SUP race before think the same? I suspect they will not and will quesiton the result which will distract from the achievements of the athletes in that final. Look at the 2024 Gymnastics for how that can turn out, I do not follow gymnastics at all but even I know there was a legal battle over medals that may still be on-going. That is not sport. The Olympics does not want to deal with controversal finishes in the Olympic Final of any event. The Olympics wants to give that massive global audience entertainment and a clear winner.
I think that Olympic inclusion will force rule changes on SUP in an area that the governing bodies already struggle with.
Rules - Contact
At Olympic level the winner in an event decided by a stopwatch cannot be open to interpretation of a rule that is as vague as the rules for buoy turns in SUP.
And they are vague.
Without a visual marker on every board then who is to say where half way is, as atletes step back to turn they dramatically slow down meaning the chasing paddler can simply use the leaders board as a brake, as long as the nose of their board is 'half way' along the side of the board.
If you are reading this thinking that rule changes will not happen then take a look at the history of short track speed skating in the Winter Olympics, this was introduced with a fanfare as the excitng, close contact, rock and roll version of speed skating where skaters could, within the boundaries of some vague rules that the skaters all understood, use physical contact to gain an advantage. Not anymore. After that first glorious winter games the rules were tightened up, contact was reduced and the sport became more ... professional. It is still exciting and unpredictable but it is not what it was.
Those vague rules for turns within SUP racing will, in my opinion will exclude the Technical Race from any Olympic test event. There is no alternative to the existing bouy turn rule that is easy to implement and will allow racers to actually race. See, I do understand racing even though I am not very good at it!
This will, I think, force either a rule change or, more likely a format change for Sprint racing so that paddlers will not come into contact at turns. Either by having a straight line sprint or fewer paddlers in each race with one buoy each to turn around.
If that happens is that really SUP Racing….