World Games 2022 organizers expect a groundswell of ticket sales – and a high-quality, Olympic-caliber field in many events

With the Olympics in Tokyo coming to a close last week, organizers of the World Games eagerly await their chance to build on its legacy next year.

Set to be held in Birmingham, Alabama from July 7-17, 2022, the World Games are a quadrennial 11-day multi-sport event open to all sports that aren’t a regular part of the Olympic program. While organized by the independent International World Games Federation, the Games are also backed by the International Olympic Committee and are widely thought of as a trial setting for potential new Olympic events.

3,600 elite athletes from more than 100 countries are expected to compete across 36 sports; which include some disciplines that were guest-featured in Tokyo 2020′s program such as softball, karate and sport climbing, but also less familiar ones to Olympic spectators like korfball, powerlifting and sumo.

Nick Sellers, the CEO of Birmingham 2022, and Cat Whitehill, an honorary co-chair of the event who won Olympic gold in 2004 with the U.S. women’s soccer team, spoke to Around the Rings managing editor Gerard Farek about their preparations. Having already hit $400,000 in sales since tickets launched last month, Sellers is confident that local fans especially will drive a high audience turnout at the Games.

“We expect that the majority of our fans will come in in probably a 6 to 8 hour drive time. So generally what we would call the “Super Southeast” with respect to ticket sales”, Sellers predicted. “We’re forecasting upwards of 15-20,000 international fans that will be here to watch the Games, but out of the half a million tickets we have available for these [36] competitions over 10 days, the majority of those we expect to come from the Southeast United States”.

“We’re still going through with this [coronavirus] Delta variant, there’s still a lot of angst, but I think as we get through this fall, more and more people hopefully take the vaccine, the college and professional football seasons in the United States start, people gather again and there’s confidence around that: it’ll continue to boost our ticket sales going into the season and in early 2022”.

Though the World Games were postponed by a year due to the coronavirus pandemic, creating logistical problems with media rights in particular, Sellers sees the delay as a silver lining in that it enabled improvements to be made to Games venues.

“We have several venues that were not going to be fully constructed this July for what we had originally scheduled and we wouldn’t be able to showcase them. But because we moved [the Games], one of the major silver linings is our brand new Protective Stadium – it’ll be home to opening and closing ceremonies, it’s a beautiful 45,000 seat state of the art venue. We’ll be ready to welcome the world”, Sellers described. He also highlighted a planned city project, City Walk Birmingham, that aims to make the area around the venues safer and more pedestrian friendly.

As a native of Birmingham, Cat Whitehill likewise vouched for the host city’s preparedness, expressing her belief that the Games could hardly have found a better place to be held.

“I think Birmingham is such an incredible city. There’s so much that it has to offer, so much growth recently, that’s so exciting. When I come home, I sometimes don’t even recognize it from when I grew up just because of the growth of downtown and all the surrounding areas”, Whitehill said.

“For all the athletes coming in, it’s going to be exciting to show off our city. And I just know that we’ll be great hosts and everybody’s preparing properly. It sounds amazing so far. It’s only been a month, but I know that, as soon as people keep hearing about it, they’re going to want to come and see these athletes, and just see how awesome Birmingham is.”

When it comes to the highlight of the Games, Sellers’ answer was clear: the range and quality of the sports competitions. He shared that over 400 Team USA athletes are expected to participate in Birmingham, most of whom either in sports featured as a one-off at Tokyo or in non-Olympic disciplines of regular Olympic sports, which are also a part of the World Games.

“The US women’s [softball] team and Japan will have that grudge match in the gold medal round; the US just got edged out [in Tokyo] and we expect both of those teams hopefully intact with those tremendous athletes to be competing yet again at World Games 2022”, said Sellers.

“The other sports that are competing in the Olympics and will be competing here include karate; we’ve been watching unbelievable action there and many of those athletes will be here. Archery may have different disciplines but will have many of the same athletes, and sport climbing will be here as well.”

“[It was] indoor handball in Tokyo, but because we all know things are always more fun at the beach, we’ll have beach handball at World Games 2022 and probably some of the same athletes will be competing. And then finally, gymnastics. We won’t have, I don’t expect, a Simone Biles or a Suni Lee... but we will have tumbling, trampoline and other competitions on our platform, and perhaps even some of the same gymnasts.”

Alongside the more well-established events, Sellers is also excited about the myriad diverse and lesser-known sports being contested in Birmingham; for whom the Games will provide a rare opportunity to showcase themselves in front of mainstream audiences and the IOC.

“You’ve got traditional sports like men’s and women’s sumo, Muay Thai and kickboxing… But then you’ve got sports that many folks have never heard of in America like parkour, which is a fantastic athletic acrobatic sport, and drone racing, and canopy piloting, where these athletes are jumping out of helicopters, they pop a parachute about 1,000 feet before the ground”.

“There’s a lot of great connectivity [with the Olympic Movement], and that’s why we call this, frankly, the new generation of sports. That’s how we define the World Games. Many of them are the fastest growing, emerging sports around the world”.