The word is beginning to spread that competitive paintball will be a demonstration sport at this year's World Games in July. The games are being held this time around in Taiwan in conjunction with the APIT (Asian Paintball Invitational Tournament.) 16 teams--apparently all Asian--will represent competitive paintball and will run side-by-side with the APIT.
Info is hard to come by as I couldn't find any mention of demonstration sports or paintball on the World Games website--but you might have better luck or be more patient than I was. And I couldn't find anything on APIT other than some mentions about last year's event and bit of YouTube footage. VFTD's Malaysian correspondent only knows the Malaysian teams that will be participating in the games demo and APIT event. It all seems rather odd that so little information is available about what might be a significant step toward legitimizing competitive paintball within the sports world. (And, frankly, if you take a look at some of the "real" sports that are already part of the World Games you gotta wonder what paintball has being doing wrong.) Even odder in that DYE Asia is supposed to be heavily involved.
UPDATE: Couple of things I forgot. The Kaohsiung Paintball Association is supposed to be the organizer but far as Google can tell they don't have a website either. For the latest check out Villian Paintball--in the paintblog list on the sidebar.
UP UPDATED: Er, the Kaohsiung Paintball Association does (sorta) have a website at rocpaintball.org which looks mostly like a field site and all the links seem to go to their forum which Google will translate into English but still isn't very informative.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
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3 comments:
The world games... great idea for promoting new sports and giving some credability to some world sports federations but paintball needs to stand on its own two feet. Currently there is no world wide body for controlling paintball so it would never meet the criteria for being included in the world games. Host city gets to include sports that don't meet all the sports inclusion requirements eg. paintball. Funny enough rule 12.3 states Team competition shall be limited to six teams from six different countries?? From all reports the Taiwan paintball guys are going to try and leverage some media exposure by holding a tournament at the same time as the World Games. Dye having a factory in the host city are looking to cash in on this exposure so it's not suprising many of the invited teams have some links to Dye. Well if it helps paintball it can't be that bad even if it has no paintball credability...
Thanks, Houdini, Very interesting. Begins to fill in the picture some.
there will be an Australian team playing aswell....apparantly qualification was through World Cup Asia last November. Australian team SWAT finished 4th I think and were invited to represent Australia at the event.
So I'm assuming the other top 4 teams were invited to aswell
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