On Monday, July 24, 2028, Rowing Coastal Beach Sprints—aka beach sprint—will debut as a full Olympic discipline, and all our hopes and dreams for this sport will finally be put to the test in front of a global TV audience. Maybe.
Yes, it will debut at LA28 that day with the women’s and men’s solos’ time trials, the last 16 knockouts and then, later, the quarterfinals, semifinals and medal matches. But whether or not any of those events are shown on TV depends on the million-dollar question: Will people watch?
Beach sprint was created to be a more engaging version of rowing, especially for those who aren’t rowers, coaches or pre-existing fans. (It has waves, turns and jumps.) But a glance at the provisional schedule for the LA28 Olympic Games shows that it’ll be going head-to-head with more than 20 other events that day, including major sports like basketball, soccer and tennis, fan favorites like athletics, beach volleyball and gymnastics, and other smaller, but more established, sports like archery, table tennis and wrestling. In the streaming era, every minute of action from every sport is going to be online somewhere, but success for beach sprint won’t be that its devoted fans seek out and watch it. No, success will be that the major networks turn their attention to the sport, and that its exposure instantly jumps from thousands to millions of people.
Not everyone gets their 15 minutes of fame, and as exciting as we may feel beach sprint regattas have the potential to be, there is a clear risk that in the few seconds the live TV cuts from the Olympic stadium to the beach, what viewers at home will see won’t thrill them. And a big part of that danger may come from the rules by which we run these regattas. Put simply, for fans, and because of the regulations, the time trials are boring and the semifinals are frequently frustrating.
This past season I’ve been able to attend three major regattas—the International Coastal Rowing Beach Sprints LNC in Cyprus, the fourth stage of the Filippi Trophy in Italy and the European championships in Spain—and I’ve previously worked as a coach in flatwater rowing. I understand that even though races may be short, regattas are always long days, and that there are certain hoops that have to be jumped through to get to the most interesting parts. At the fourth stage in Italy there were 65 men and 50 women signed up in the senior solos. That many athletes didn’t fit directly into the first, eight-race knockout round in either category, and so we were treated to two hours of watching athletes going around in circles one-by-one, followed by a couple hours more of time trials for the junior solos and the senior and junior mixed doubles.
Donoratico was actually quite exciting because the waves were huge, and those tricky conditions also luckily meant the second time trial was canceled. But no one is expecting similar conditions in Long Beach. Non-rowing fans that stumble across the time trials at LA28 may assume that this is just a practice day. Lightweight rowing fans might continue to fume that “they cut close lightweight races for this?”
A few hours later, beach sprint will hopefully become more stimulating when the sudden-death knockout rounds begin. But even those come with an exception: the semifinals. The idea behind back-to-back races theoretically has merit: each round will get more and more exciting as athletes battle built-up fatigue over an intense hour of competition. Yet experience shows that the theory doesn’t work in practice. Both athletes and coaches have gotten wiser over the last few years, and the ideal strategy has become clear enough that even commentators on World Rowing’s livestreams openly talk about it.
If you’re winning your semifinal, keep going, but consider backing off a little bit as long as you can control the race. If you’re pretty much tied with your competitor, keep fighting. Win and you’re guaranteed a medal—gold or silver—lose and you’re not. But if you’re behind, stop and conserve all of your energy for the B final. Bring your stroke down to a gentle paddle, and stroll back up the beach to the line.
“In Los Angeles, we will be in the Olympics for the first time,” says Netherlands beach sprint head coach Bjorn van den Ende. “[And it] will be a problem that you have semifinals that are not interesting.”
“Everyone is getting experienced, so every coach probably says to his athletes ‘Go as hard as you can in the first 250. If you feel that you’re not going to win, back down. Just go slow because you want to go for the bronze medal’,” van den Ende adds. “That’s not how racing should be.”
Back at London 2012, I was lucky enough to work as a “flash-quote reporter” for the Olympic beach volleyball tournament, and I got the chance to see behind-the-scenes of one of the smaller, but popular, sports. I don’t remember any external media showing up until the final rounds, and when they did, few knew much about the sport. The same could happen for beach sprint, meaning the races that are often the closest and most exciting—knockouts and quarterfinals—get missed, and many people’s first introduction to the sport will be watching one person win while the other gives up halfway.
There is an important point here: We don’t have to do any of it this way. We, or World Rowing, invented beach sprint out of the blue, and a little over a decade ago made up some rules for the new sport. For the good of beach sprint, and rowing in general, we could change those rules.
World governing bodies don’t always get things right. In 1993, FIFA introduced the “Golden Goal”—essentially sudden death in extra time—to try to avoid soccer games going to penalty shootouts. The idea didn’t work, because the fear of conceding a goal became bigger than the desire to score one. FIFA tried to modify the rule, converting it to a “Silver Goal” that would end play after the first half of extra time. But that was equally as unpopular, and from the 2006 World Cup onwards, both were scratched forever from the FIFA rulebook.
“Beach sprint is all about knockout racing, one against one. But a lot of countries never row one against one at the world championships, because they are never in the last 16,” van den Ende says. “I would love us to go to a pool system, based on a world ranking.”
Van den Ende explains that a world ranking—like Wild Rowing’s—could be used to seed the top teams into different groups, much in the same way as soccer teams are seeded at the FIFA World Cup, and the boats in each group could face off against each other in multiple head-to-head heats. “Everyone races three times before you go to the [knockout] round,” he says. “You can make it really interesting because if you lose one race, you’re not out.”
He believes in the idea enough that he’s drawn up a workable timetable for how it could work at LA28, and sent that along to World Rowing. “It’s not that big. We have [64] athletes so you can make a nice pool system that’s going to be exciting. The first day you have all the group races, and the next day you have the finals.”
But the group stage concept is also more than simply theoretical in beach sprint. Pete Wells from Swift Racing has already been running junior regattas using a four-lane, mixed-group system. Rowers race in three heats, each time facing different opponents, and are assigned points according to their finish order. And the four with the best score after the heats face off in a single final.
For 16 athletes, using Wells’s system, everyone gets to compete three times (and up to four) in beach sprint’s iconic head-to-head races. Each athlete faces a minimum of nine different opponents and there are 13 races in total. Using the standard World Rowing system, some might only row once or twice (depending on the number of time trials) and will never get to experience a head-to-head race. And with 16 races plus time trials, the day is much longer. According to Wells, “in Ireland, the parents now demand the four-ball competition, as it makes the day worth it.”
A group stage system would also be far more in line with World Rowing’s goal of expanding the sport globally. Time trials need accurate (and complicated) timing systems. You’ll have at least three or four athletes on the course at the same time, and you can’t get their results wrong. A few seconds’ error could shift them out of position or eliminate them. Switch to group stages, and you’re only counting wins or losses. You don’t even technically need a clock to run an entire regatta.
Uncompetitive semifinals can be easily addressed, too, by very simple adjustments to the schedule. The extremely short recovery time between back-to-back races is ultimately the problem. Give athletes even a few more minutes to recover, and we’ll see more of them willing to take the risk and push to reach the A final.
In fact, not everyone in the international community uses World Rowing’s system. The 2026 Coupe de la Jeunesse Beach Sprint competition intermixed its men’s and women’s, but not mixed double, events, buying athletes a little extra time between rounds. Looking back at the results and the livestream, six out of 16 of the men’s and women’s semifinals were decided by less than four seconds, but none of the mixed doubles. And the loser of five of the closest semifinals went on to win the bronze medal. Those extra minutes don’t take away from the soul of the sport.
There is risk, of course, in making radical rule changes practically on the eve of the Olympics, and that inertia may be the biggest reason we still do things this way. But there is an even bigger risk in sticking with a system that clearly isn’t working. Beach sprint has huge potential to be exciting and engaging, and we shouldn’t allow the regulations to kill the vibe.