Why Ultimate Frisbee should be an Olympic sport

Five times a week I summon the energy to leave my student house in Nottingham to go to training. Once a week my teammates and I will go to the gym for more intense sessions to improve our sprint speeds and our vertical jump height. In fact I probably spend more time training and playing then I spend in lectures or working. You may assume I play football or rugby but in fact I play a sport you have probably never heard of, Ultimate Frisbee.

Frisbee? As a team game? Yes. And a serious one at British universities where it has just been added to the British University and College sports roster. Every Wednesday colleges across the country will compete across 13 different leagues most of which have five teams. At the end of the year the top two teams in each league will go to the Nationals where over a weekend of intense competition one team will be crowned national champions. (I play for Nottingham first and second team.)

So what is this sport and where did it come from? Ultimate Frisbee is a fast paced, non contact sport where the goal is to throw a Frisbee to a teammate standing in the opposition’s end zone thereby scoring the equivalent of a try or goal. As in American Football, if the disc is dropped or intercepted it is turned over to the opposition who continue in the other direction. The size of the pitch is similar to a football field and each team have seven players on the field at any one time with rolling substitutions. A good team needs to be athletic, tactically aware and consistently accurate with their passes. A particularly active player can cover several miles in a one-hour match.

Ultimate Frisbee takes sportsmanship seriously. Unlike any other competitive sport the game has no referees meaning it is completely self officiated; if you believe you have been fouled by an opposing player you resolve the problem with that player. The game relies on the integrity of everyone playing and surprisingly there are rarely any issues.

The sport was unofficially created by students of Columbia High School, New Jersey in 1968 13 years after the Wham-O toy company started mass-producing the first flying disc, known then as the Pluto Platter (later Frisbee). At the time the game was part of the counter culture played by people who wore tie dye t-shirts, listened to Bob Dylan and thought that a Frisbee was the answer blowing in the wind. The people that played Frisbee at that time are one reason that the sport has been slow to gain popularity: they had no interest in commercialising it. However they were very good at encouraging everyone around them to join in and the game slowly spread across America and into Europe, Asia and South America.

The sport has come a long way since its birth in the 1960s. Today over five million people play it in America alone, there is a world championship held every four years which in 2012 was in Japan with 23 different countries participating. There is also an international club championship every four years.

In Britain Ultimate is primarily played at university but there is also a competitive national league as well as a GB squad that travels around the world. In 2013 Ultimate secured its first TV deal in America with ESPN and the two semi professional leagues in America growing fast.

Ultimate is also part of the world games, which is a feeder tournament into the Olympic Games run by the international Olympic committee for sports like squash and bowling.

When I tell someone I play a competitive sport called Ultimate Frisbee, they usually snigger, and suggest that Frisbee is something to do with a dog in a field. But when I sit them down and show them YouTube clips of a competitive game they usually get it. If Ultimate was a part of the Olympic Games this understanding might spread across the world.

I also believe that Ultimate has a good chance of catching on in schools. Not only is it good exercise and promotes good sportsmanship but it can truly be played by anyone. Some of the most dramatic Frisbee is played at the mixed level unlike almost any other team sport the mix of men and women make the sport more interesting and fun to watch, as shown by a thrilling game played by USA against Japan (linked below).

The sport is cheap to play, easy to pick up but very difficult to master, puts sportsmanship in front of winning, is great exercise and a lot of fun. For these reasons I think you will be hearing a lot more about it in the next decade.