The Dakar 2026 Youth Olympic Games will be a historic celebration of sports for many reasons. They are the fourth edition of the under-18 Olympics, but most importantly of all, they will mark the first time that any Olympic event, junior or senior, has been held on the African continent, the birthplace of the human race.
They will also be the Olympic debut for both baseball5—a mixed-gender, five-player version of baseball—and beach sprint. Interestingly, both of these two disciplines could argue they are the world’s youngest sport, or at least the youngest to reach an Olympic event. Beach sprint’s first international competition took place in 2015, whereas baseball5’s was in 2017. But baseball5 is arguably a simplified and standardized version of the informal variants of baseball played around the world. In contrast, beach sprint is very different to classic Olympic rowing. The new sport’s predecessor is controlled, flat and straight. Beach sprint adds turns, waves, running and transitions, and converts a 2,000m power-endurance sport into 600m of pure intensity. Nothing like it existed before.
The Youth Olympics are open to athletes aged 17 years or younger at the time of the Games. The uniqueness of beach sprint is that the sport itself meets that very same criteria. The idea behind it was conceived at the World Rowing Coastal Championships in Bari, Italy, in October 2011. Its first international race took place at the Mediterranean Beach Games in Pescara, Italy, in August 2015. And its first world championship was in Shenzhen, China, in October 2019. Depending on how you count, when the first time trial at Dakar 2026 begins on Saly Beach, Senegal, this Saturday, beach sprint will be 15, 11, or just seven years old. Put another way, every single one of its 64 competitors in Dakar is older than the sport itself. The very youngest, the USA’s Alison Grove, was born two months before Bari.
The parallels of youth between beach sprint and its competitors are more than simply a number. Just as the rowers themselves are not the same athletes (nor the same people) as they were when they first began to row, beach sprint isn’t the same sport it was even seven years ago at the inaugural world championships. Both have grown up in the intervening years, and both are far from finished growing.
Beach sprint’s most important regattas, aside from worlds, were launched after 2019, and the biggest may be yet to come: next year’s planned world series. Almost four times as many national teams competed this year, in the second world championships held in China, than seven years ago, in the first. And a glance at the results illustrates the influence of innovations in strategy and training. China won gold in the mixed double in 2019 with a margin of 11.76 seconds over France. Germany beat Lithuania in the same event this year by just 0.72 seconds.
The athletes and their sport are also developing in a totally different era than that in which classic rowing did. Think about traditional rowing, and what comes to mind are storied regattas like the Royal Henley, the Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race or the Head of the Charles; attendees wearing their best suits or dresses; illustrious, historic clubs with their boards of directors; serious people entrenched within cultural hierarchies.
Beach sprint is none of that. And not just because it takes place on the sand a long way from rowing’s traditional bases, but also because of the cultural disruption of social media. Like its athletes, and much less like its parents, beach sprint was born to be a digital native in an augmented world. Its action is made to be shared, liked and re-shared.
Just like its athletes, too, beach sprint was hit hard by COVID-19. Yes, the pandemic affected all of us, adults included, but it surely most affected those young enough to still be growing up. Kids lost entire school years to COVID, with all the in-person social experiences those usually entail: first days, parties, sports and school trips. Beach sprint had its second world championships put on hold for a year, and even then there were countries unable to travel to worlds in 2021 because of restrictions. And its planned Youth Olympic debut at Dakar 2022 is actually taking place at Dakar 2026; the athletes that might have been favorites four years ago are now too old to compete.
Perhaps there is also the archetypal example of the hopes and dreams of a parent not matching up with the aspirations and interests of their child. We’ve argued previously that the regulations by which World Rowing organizes regattas are hurting the sport. Many people within the beach sprint community want change, and there is a fear of the damaging effect of sticking with rules that were invented before the sport had evolved into what it is today.
Dakar 2026 could offer a big test of this. Unless big waves complicate things, the first two days of competition in Senegal, dominated by time trials, are likely to be quite boring. And many of the athletes from smaller nations will be sent home without ever experiencing beach sprint’s iconic head-to-head knockout format. If the International Olympic Committee’s decision over the Brisbane 2032 program is influenced by what happens over the next few days in Senegal, there is a significant risk that beach sprint could be dropped, and that, as a consequence, elite interest in the sport could be killed off.
Regardless of that danger, though, the beach sprint experiment may still be paying off for rowing’s global governing body. A key motivation for inventing and supporting beach sprint was to expand rowing beyond its traditional borders. Coastal rowing boats are lower cost and more durable, and beach sprint training doesn’t require access to a perfect 2,000m course—or, for many countries, even a beach—. At Dakar 2026, rowers representing 46 different countries will be competing, and that number doesn’t include key flatwater powers that are absent like Canada, the Netherlands or New Zealand.
The rapid expansion of the rowing world is sure to have unknown, although positive, consequences. When the youth athletes at Dakar 2026 become seniors, perhaps they’ll aspire to continue racing at LA28, Brisbane 2032 and wherever the 2036 Olympics might be. And maybe they’ll become the role models or even the coaches that will bring a whole new generation to rowing worldwide.
Again, depending on how you count, beach sprint could already be considered a teenager, or may be set to turn 13 the same year as its full Olympic debut at LA28. Experience would tell us that these can be tumultuous and life-changing years for anyone. Perhaps that will be no different for the world’s youngest sport.