Rowing chief confident in beach sprint's Olympic future

QINGDAO, Shandong — With music playing, waves breaking and athletes sprinting across the sand, the 2026 World Rowing Beach Sprint Finals in Qingdao offered a glimpse of how one of the world's oldest sports is reinventing itself ahead of its Olympic debut at Los Angeles 2028.

For World Rowing president Jean-Christophe Rolland, the event marked an important step in the development of a discipline designed to bring rowing to new audiences through shorter races, unpredictable conditions and a more accessible setting.

Beach sprint is a short, head-to-head knockout format of coastal rowing, the open-water branch of the rowing family.

While classic rowing takes place on flat water with specialized boats, coastal rowing is raced at sea where waves demand sturdier craft. Beach sprint adds a third dimension: athletes start by running across the beach to their boats, race through two 250-meter sections around buoys, before sprinting back across the sand to hit the finish button.

"It is still rowing because we have a boat, a sliding seat and oars. But the concept, the environment and the rules are completely different," Rolland said.

That difference, he argued, is exactly its appeal. Music, the beach setting, running on sand and jumping into the boat make it "a little more fun", while the waves inject an element of uncertainty.

"Depending on how athletes ride the waves, they are affected by the surrounding conditions. That makes the sport a little unpredictable. For the public and spectators, it is probably more fun and faster-paced."

He also drew a clear line between the two coastal formats held in Qingdao: last week's World Rowing Coastal Championships is a six-kilometer endurance race with all crews starting together, while beach sprint is a compact knockout competition, the exact format that will appear at the Los Angeles Olympics.

Ready for LA28

Rowing has been part of the Olympic program since the first modern Games in 1896, while coastal rowing only took shape about two decades ago. In October 2023, the International Olympic Committee Executive Board approved coastal rowing beach sprints for LA 2028, where men's solo, women's solo and mixed double sculls will award three sets of medals.

"It allows us to reach different territories and different audiences, and the environment is completely different from classic rowing," Rolland said. "At the Olympic Games, we can benefit from sharing a venue with other sports, rather than needing a standalone venue."

With two years to go, he said the discipline is still maturing. "When the discipline started, it was limited to a very small number of countries. Now its inclusion in the Olympic program has encouraged countries to invest in it. I would not say that we have reached maturity yet, but it is absolutely clear that this discipline really matters in rowing. It continues to grow year after year."

World Rowing is refining the rules to keep them simple. A World Beach Sprint Series will be launched in 2027, with stops in Turkiye and China.

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In 2025, China hosted the World Rowing Championships for the first time in Shanghai, followed by the Shanghai Sprint, the coastal championships and now the beach sprint finals. "This shows how active China has become in rowing and how much it contributes to the sport," Rolland said.

He recalled China's women's rowing medals at the Tokyo Olympics and his visit to China's National Games last year.

"China has a large number of athletes and the capacity to perform at the highest level," he said.

For China's young rowers, his advice was simple: "Train, train, train. There is no other path to performance than training and making the effort."