We’re now less than 1,000 days from when rowing’s newest variation will debut at the Olympic Games (913 days exactly, from the publication of this story). Los Angeles 2028 will be the ultimate test for the startup sport of beach sprint, and not just for its athletes, but also for the very idea behind its invention.
Coastal rowing, in general, has been promoted as a way to bring in new participants—athletes, clubs and countries—that may lack the resources and rowing infrastructure of the flat-water rowing establishment. And beach sprint was created to bring in new audiences that may have zero knowledge or background in rowing.
Driven by these hypotheses, and backed by World Rowing, the sport’s global federation, beach sprint’s journey from conception to Olympic competition has taken place in record time. Beach volleyball, for comparison, was invented back in 1895, one year before the first modern Olympic Games, Athens 1896, but only debuted at Atlanta 1996, an entire century later. Breakdancing—officially “breaking”—evolved in the 1970s, but had to wait until Paris 2024 to reach the echelon of world sport.
Beach sprint rowing was invented in 2011, developed into a race format over the following four years, and only had its first actual competition in 2015 (at the Mediterranean Beach Games in Pescara, Italy). Most of the athletes that will be competing for medals in Los Angeles only learned how to beach sprint over the last few years. Some may not yet have taken that step.
Tokyo 2020 Olympic women’s singles champion Emma Twigg, from New Zealand, for example, was a newcomer to beach sprint rowing just over three years ago, and now is a two-time world champion (2022 and 2025), and could well be a favorite at LA28. Australia’s Sophia Wightman hadn’t tried coastal rowing until last April, and won a bronze medal in the mixed quad at the 2025 World Rowing Beach Sprint Finals. Browse through the list of competitors (and medal winners) from the last few years and you’re sure to find many similar stories.
The start hasn’t always been smooth. The Bali 2023 World Beach Games, which would have included beach sprint, were canceled when the host, the Indonesian Olympic Committee, pulled out at the last minute. The same year, the World Rowing Beach Sprint Finals were reallocated from Sabaudia to Barletta, both in Italy, after the first city broke its contract to host the event. And last year, the Finals were again moved, from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to Antalya, Turkey, for similar reasons. Information and results about key regattas in the sport’s short history have also become lost or hard to find when web links have broken or regatta websites have been switched off. The Gdansk 2024 European Beach Sprint Championships, for example, (results copied here) or last year’s 1924 Pharoes Trophy (results).
And not everyone has been in favor of its inclusion. The decision to add beach sprint to the Olympics comes at the same time that the remaining Olympic lightweight rowing events, the men’s and women’s doubles, have been cut. The men’s lightweight four had previously been replaced by the women’s four at Tokyo 2020, bringing gender equality across the sport, and beach sprint isn’t at fault for the Olympic demise of lightweight rowing: the decision to remove lightweight competitions from the Olympics was made by the International Olympic Committee itself. But in opening up rowing to new athletes and new audiences, others may feel their access has been removed.
However, beach sprint appears to be becoming an unstoppable phenomenon. (Even storied boat manufacturer Empacher finally joined the race last year.) Early data would imply that World Rowing has succeeded in its goal to broaden the competitive base of the sport. Tunisia, for example, has won only one medal at the flat-water world championships, a silver in the lightweight double last year. But in beach sprint, Tunisia has an enviable record of four gold medals, one silver and four bronzes. Spain is another good example. While ranked No. 26 in the all-time flat-water world championship standings, Spain is No. 1 on the beach.
It is also far easier to understand than flat-water rowing if you’re not a rower or rowing coach. You don’t need to know so much about stroke rates or technique differences. Athlete A won because they caught a wave on the way home, or athlete B lost because they missed a buoy or even flipped their boat. It is exciting and accessible in the same way mountain biking and cyclocross are within the world of cycling.
Yet that doesn’t mean it doesn’t suffer some of the same problems faced by its more established rowing sibling, and other minority sports in general. Even the short discipline of beach sprint takes place over a distance two-and-a-half times longer than an Olympic stadium. Spectators are rarely close enough to feel the intensity of the action, and if your viewing angle (in person or on TV) isn’t exactly perpendicular to the path of the boats, understanding who is winning can be very difficult.
Part of the motivation for the creation of this site, Wild Rowing, is to try to better tell the stories of beach sprint, to bring the sport to its fans and potential fans. When an Olympic viewer catches a wipeout on TV in summer 2028, they might hang around a little longer to watch the next few beach sprint races. But what will keep them hooked long-term are the back stories of the athletes, the rivalries, the struggles and even the controversies.
This task won’t be easy. As an example, our calendar aims to include information on key future and past races, but it is still very incomplete because there is no centralized source of information. There are more than 150 member federations of World Rowing, each with their own website (and some without websites) in their own languages. And regatta results can be hosted across various different timing platforms, or in exported PDFs, instagram posts, or simply may have disappeared forever. Knowing when competitions happen, and who won, is crucial to understanding any sport.
But the guarantee of beach sprint rowing, just like the sport itself, is that the race to LA28 is going to be a wild ride. And we hope to bring you along with us.