Credit PHOTOGRAPH BY PRESTON KERES / MCT VIA GETTY
Since the early nineteen-seventies, when it first appeared on a high-school lawn in New Jersey, Ultimate Frisbee has been kicked around like the frayed hacky sack of the sports world, getting called everything from a “glorified game of toss” to “World of Warcraft for extroverts.” Type the phrase “Ultimate Frisbee is” into Google’s search engine and the first autocomplete pops up: “not a sport.” Frisbees, it seems, are just not the right shape or material to be taken seriously. But on August 2nd, the International Olympic Committee announced its disagreement with this popular consensus, officially recognizing the sport’s international governing body, the futuristic-sounding World Flying Disc Federation, or W.F.D.F. Ultimate is now eligible for inclusion, and I.O.C. funding, in a Summer Olympics program, as one of the roughly two dozen certified sports on display. This is not a joke.
“I have two doctoral degrees on sport,” Tom Crawford, a former director of coaching for the U.S. Olympic Committee who has also consulted with the N.B.A., N.H.L. and N.F.L., said. “I believe it can enhance human existence when done right. And when I saw Ultimate I thought, This is like everything that you would want to bake into a sport, if you were creating it from scratch. The speed, quickness, power. Women and men playing. Few disputes. And the entertainment value. I was like, This is wicked entertaining stuff! In one weekend I fell in love with the sport and saw its huge potential.”
Crawford watched his first Ultimate match six years ago, at the prompting of his niece. Now head of U.S.A. Ultimate, he was instrumental in bringing Olympic recognition to the sport. “There are still skeptics out there,” Crawford said, “who say, in response to the I.O.C. decision, They’re just a bunch of pot-smoking hippies and an example of how the Olympic movement is going in the tank. There’s also those saying how cool this would be.”
The World Flying Disc Federation, with sixty-two member associations on five continents, has been pushing discs towards the Olympic stage for about five years, with Ultimate out front. The I.O.C. loved a few things about the sport, to which it granted provisional recognition in 2013: the spirit of the game, gender equity, global growth, youth appeal, and, most of all, how fun it is to watch. The sport’s leaders believe it has come this far, and will eventually be included in the Olympic games, because it’s a better spectator sport—more easily understood and more telegenic—than plenty of “traditional” Olympic sports. (Apologies to rowing, fencing, and archery.) The financial and logistical barrier to entry for the sport at the recreational level is low: all you need is a patch of grass or sand and a ten-dollar disc. Roughly 7.5 million people now play disc sports in more than ninety countries around the world, including 4.5 million in the U.S., according to W.F.D.F. and the Sports and Fitness Industry Association.
The history of flying-disc team sports—which also include disc golf and Guts (“the original extreme sport”)—has been traced back to a Connecticut bakery in the eighteen-seventies, owned by William Russell Frisbie. Yale University students took to tossing around Mr. Frisbie’s pie tins (or cookie tins, some contend) after eating their contents, yelling “Frisbie!” to alert each other of flying metal. By the nineteen-forties, a California carpenter named Walter Fredrick Morrison had designed and begun selling a commercial flying disc, which he called the Flyin’ Cake Pan, the Whirlo-Way, and the Flyin-Saucer, before settling on the alliterative and cosmologically alluring “Pluto Platter.” The Wham-O toy company acquired rights to his platter, which they soon renamed the Frisbee, in 1957. More than two hundred million have sold since. Joel Silver, who would later become a famous Hollywood producer, helped codify the rules of Ultimate, in 1970, when he was eighteen, two years after the first known game was played, at his high school in Maplewood, New Jersey, between the student council and newspaper staff.
Combining the constant movement of soccer and the aerial passing of football with a Boy Scout code of ethics, Ultimate is played between two teams of seven, on a rectangular field a hundred and twenty yards long and forty yards wide, including two end zones. The goal is to score points by catching a pass in the opponent’s end zone. Running with the disc is not allowed. Nor is intentional contact. Unique among sports, it’s self-refereed. This last feature relies upon a steadfast embrace of sportsmanlike conduct, referred to as “spirit of the game.” It is Ultimate’s most cherished and fussed-over attribute, which the game’s purists have sought to protect as it has moved from the fringes to the fore.
In 2001, Ultimate was included as a medal sport for the first time at the World Games, in Akita, Japan, a sort of Olympics for non-Olympic sports. Since 2013, the college championships have aired on ESPNU, with other major tournaments appearing on ESPN3. Frisbee has even gone pro: In 2012, the American Ultimate Disc League appeared, and now boasts twenty-five teams in North America, while Major League Ultimate débuted a year later, with eight U.S. squads. Pro outfits include the Indianapolis AlleyCats, the Madison Radicals, and the San Francisco Dogfish. Most players earn twenty-five to fifty dollars a game; games are typically attended by a few hundred people. In May, 2014, Ultimate appeared on the “top plays” of ESPN’s widely viewed SportsCenter show twice in one day.
That’s more cultural relevance than many other sports enjoy. In early 2013, wrestling was booted from the core group of twenty-five sports that will automatically appear in the 2020 Summer Olympics, in Tokyo, in part because the I.O.C. questioned its poor performance in global television ratings and press coverage. An Olympic staple since 708 B.C., wrestling had to go through a review process alongside latecomer sports vying to fill the last three spots. (The summer program is capped at twenty-eight.) Eight sports were on the short list, which was winnowed down to three: baseball/softball, squash, and wrestling. In September, 2013, wrestling won its way back in. “I think that was a message,” said Robert Rauch, a former club-level national champion who is currently president of W.F.D.F., “that the old ways are going to be changing.”
“What we understand,” continued Rauch, who began pushing for Olympic recognition in 2012, “is that the I.O.C. is very concerned about remaining relevant in today’s world. Despite the success of the London 2012 Olympics, they are incredibly worried because the average viewership age, on NBC and globally, for the Olympics was over fifty. That’s not the target demographic for anybody. Today, younger people are less interested in sports. They’re less interested in watching sports. And, in part, the Olympics, with so many of the traditional sports that have been there sort of out of inertia, you know, are really not of a whole lot of interest. The message to wrestling was: nobody really cares about virtually anything you guys do anymore. That’s why you saw snowboarding coming into the winter Olympics under the skiing banner. That’s why you see rugby sevens at the 2016 Olympics.”
And that’s why, he insists, we may see Ultimate there within a decade.
“It’s fun to watch a Frisbee sail through the air,” Rauch said. “You see it bouncing off the wind, you see a good thrower use that wind to curve it in at the right place. Our hope is that we’ll be in a position, in 2017, to make a credible pitch to put forward the mixed gender division of Ultimate as a viable candidate for the 2024 Olympics.” Depending upon the host city, either the traditional grass version or beach Ultimate could be chosen.
There’s an early indicator that Ultimate has an edge over baseball, squash, and other would-be Olympic sports for inclusion in the summer of 2024: the I.O.C.’s sports department now plays a regular Ultimate pickup game after its lunch meetings. There’s not a whiff of weed in the air. “Our primary contact at the I.O.C. these days, we bought him one of the new W.F.D.F. shirts and we’ve been teaching him how to throw the disc,” Robert Rauch said. “He’s not bad for a guy who grew up playing ball sports.”
