Recently if you have been following the Ultimate Frisbee news cycle you would have heard that the International Olympic Committee (IOC) officially recognized Ultimate as an Olympic sport which means that in just a few short years a lot more people might see the sport played during a summer olympic event.
However the problem that the Ultimate community at large has had is that it believes that becoming an Olympic sport is the final goal for Ultimate.
Olympic recognition is not the final step in a sport’s evolution, and it doesn’t offer true growth for the sport in the long run. - Click here to tweet
Simply because Ultimate gets played in the Olympics doesn’t mean that flocks of new people will begin to start playing the sport. Sure there will be some growth for the sport as new people will get introduced to the sport, but the best opportunity for the sport to truly take off is to develop a true world cup event for Ultimate. Now I realize that there are the world games events for Ultimate and there is World Ultimate Club Championships but there really isn’t an event that is on par with the soccer/football world cup.
If Ultimate has its own world cup scale event every four years or every two years then there will be enormous growth in sport because it won’t get drowned out by potentially 27 other sports or sporting events. With an Ultimate world cup event, the sport can be introduced to millions of people without needing to compete against other sports. The key to making a world cup format introduce the sport to more people then falls into the hands of sports broadcasting on TV.
Once the sport has a true world-scale event that is broadcast internationally on TV, then will we begin to see widespread growth in the sport.
TL;DR: Don't worry about Ultimate Frisbee in the Olympics, make a new World Cup event for it.
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