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Beach Sprints is a head-to-head rowing race that starts and ends on the sand. Athletes sprint across the beach, launch into a boat, row 250 meters through a slalom course, then charge back to shore and dive for the finish. Four minutes, start to finish. It is rowing’s newest Olympic discipline, and it will make its Games debut at LA28.

Where Beach Sprints Came From

Beach Sprints grew out of coastal rowing which is rowing done in open water. Ocean swells, wind chop, surf, conditions that would swamp a traditional racing shell. People have rowed working boats in rough water for centuries, from fishing communities to lifeboat crews, and competitive coastal rowing has been organized by World Rowing for years, with its own world championships and endurance-style long-distance races.

Beach Sprints is a discipline within coastal rowing. Somebody looked at long-distance coastal racing and asked a simple question: what if we made it short, made it head-to-head, and put the whole thing right in front of the crowd?

That is the sport. Coastal rowing gave it the boats and the water. The sprint format gave it an audience.

What Makes Beach Sprint Boats Different?

You cannot race Beach Sprints in a traditional rowing shell. It would fill with water and sink.

Coastal boats are wider, heavier, and built with an open, self-draining hull. Water comes in, water goes out, the boat keeps moving. They are stable enough to launch through surf and tough enough to take a beating.

That design choice had a side effect nobody planned for: the boats are dramatically easier to learn. A traditional racing single is famously tippy and takes weeks to get comfortable in. A coastal boat is wide and forgiving. You can learn the basics in a morning.

Races run in coastal solos, doubles, and quads, with men’s, women’s, and mixed events across the board.

The Road to LA28

Rowing has been on the Olympic program since the first modern Games. For more than a century, it has looked essentially the same: long, narrow boats, flat water, a straight 2,000-meter course.

Beach Sprints changes all of that, and the International Olympic Committee added it to the program for the 2028 Games in Los Angeles.

The reasoning is not hard to follow. The IOC has spent the last several Olympic cycles adding sports that are young, fast, and easy to watch: 3×3 basketball, BMX freestyle, sport climbing, surfing, skateboarding. Beach Sprints fits that brief exactly. It is short enough to hold attention, dramatic enough to explain itself, and it happens on a beach instead of a remote rowing course two hours outside the host city.

LA28 will be the first Olympic Beach Sprints competition ever held. Today’s high performance beach sprints athletes are racing toward that.

Why It Works for Spectators

Traditional rowing can be challenging to watch from a spectator perspective. In traditional Olympic style rowing, the course is long, the course is at a distance, and the finish happens somewhere you probably are not standing.

Beach Sprints solves that by design. The start is on the sand. The finish is on the sand. The whole race takes about four minutes, and the athletes are close enough that you can hear them breathing. There is a run, a launch, a turn, a sprint, and a dive for the buzzer. You do not need to know a single rule to understand who won.

See It in Oklahoma

You don’t have to wait until 2028, and you don’t have to fly to a coast for beach sprints. You can see it here, at the Route 66 Beach Festival. And did we mention it’s an international event? Athletes from both the US National Team and the Peruvian National Team will be competing along with athletes new to the sport.

It’s happening Saturday and Sunday, August 29 and 30, at Arcadia Lake in Edmond. Come see what’s bringing elite athletes on the road to LA28 to a beach in the middle of Oklahoma.

Free festival. Just a $10 per car lake pass. You in?