Re: Carleton skiers race in Italy
In case you missed it, the 2013 Winter Universiade took place without much fanfare from Dec. 11-21, 2013 in Trentino, Italy.
But unless you happen to be a high-level university athlete, you have probably never even heard of this worldwide event before.
The average person has no idea what the Universiade is, let alone how massive it is in terms of athlete participation.
According to the official International University Sports Federation (FISU) website, the Summer and Winter Universiades, both held every two years, are the biggest multi-sports events for student-athletes around the world.
The website provides statistics showing how the summer edition has surpassed 10,000 student-athletes in both 2011 and 2013, while it said the most recent winter one in Trentino set an all-time record with over 2,600 student-athletes from 50 countries.
So, why is such a significant international university sports event going unnoticed by most people?
Just like the problem plaguing university sports generally in Canada, one possible answer to why the Universiade is not as well-known as it should be, is mediocre promotional efforts and receiving less media attention than it deserves.
While it may be big in the host city or country, the event goes largely unnoticed internationally—even among nations with competing athletes. In Canada, I only saw coverage of it in university campus newspapers.
A way to make the Universiade more appealing to fans and the media would be to improve the overall quality of world-class competition by bringing in even better athletes.
In fact, some sports did not even field national teams to represent the country, such as Canadian men’s hockey at the 2013 Winter Universiade, which was a team only comprised of student-athletes from the east coast playing in the Atlantic University Sport conference.
While no one can dispute Canada was the best team because of their gold medal win—largely because of how seriously underrated Canadian university sports are—it does bring up the question of how talented their international competition was if a regional all-star team from Canada could win the entire tournament.
Although the quality of play was high and the Universiade seems to be growing each year, there is still a lot of work to do to make them much more relevant in the future.
This higher quality of competition goes hand-in-hand with the event’s self-promotion.
If the Summer and Winter Universiades were able to evolve into a truly Olympic-like event for the world’s best university student-athletes, the improved quality of play would generate much more media coverage and marketing efforts.
This would help the Universiade achieve its potential of becoming a must-watch event for sports fans around the world one day.
