Once in a lifetime

Cracked Disc

I only have 5 or 6 discs. This one is cracked but I cannot get myself to dispose of it.

WUGC Heilbronn 2000 - España

We played ten games that week, four from the initial round robin on Sunday and Monday, then on Tuesday we lost against Italy and won against Ireland, 13-15 on a really tight game. On Wednesday we lost against both Netherlands and Russia and then also against South Africa on Thursday. We played one final game on Saturday against Taiwan again, 15-6 for us. Of course I could not remember any of this twenty years later, but I found an old agenda in which I had scribbled the games and the results, hopefully they are accurate. (edit: Espiau pointed me to the scores)

In between games, there were also training sessions, not to forget the parties. All in all, although I was reasonably fit twenty years ago, by the end of the week I was so intensely tired that there is a photo of me sleeping while "watching" the final game in the "stadium" between USA and Sweden.

 

Team España

Albert, Curt, Eric, Gabriel, Kaleen, Óscar, María José, Miquel, Peter, Rocky, Sofía, Stratton, Tim, Tino, Ignacio, Luis Alberto, Francisco, Juan Carlos, José

After one of the games with Taiwan

Party Team

World Ultimate Frisbee Championship - Heilbronn 2000 - Opening Ceremony and Team España

Opening ceremony (and the day I first met my team mates!) was on August 5th. There was a tournament newsletter and they had an article featuring Team España a couple of days later!

 

07. August 2000 

Ultimate España 

There is not a very long history of disc sports in Spain. Most Spaniards 
think of a Frisbee as „that plastic thing you bring to the beach". When you 
mention Ultimate as a sport, they say „Que?" 
Though there are only about 70 ultimate players 
currently playing in Spain, it seems that Spanish 
Ultimate is finally getting off the ground. This is 
the first year that a Spanish Team is competing at 
a World level and players have come together 
from Barcelona, Madrid, and Gran Canaria to 
form the team. 

The history of Spanish ultimate starts about 5 
years ago when a group of people started playing 
in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Canary Islands, 
eventually taking the name of Pio Pio. Within 2 
months they went to France to participate in the 
European championships. But since then, only a 
few players have been able to travel to tour- 
naments - they are closer to Africa than they are 
to mainland Spain. Still, over the years they've 
continued to play with the spirit that typifies 
Ultimate and have grown to approximately 15 
players. They hosted their first beach hat 
tournament in March 2000 which gave all the 
Canary players a chance to play in a tournament 
and left everybody else begging for it to be 
repeated annually. 

Independently, Barcelona's Patatas Bravas began 
playing in the winter of 1998 when the Ultimate 
gods conspired to bring several players together 
who had all played in other places. After realizing 
that nobody would get up before 1 pm on a week- 
end, practices were moved to late afternoon and 
Ultimate addicts were created. Since then, 
the Patatas Bravas have participated in tour- 
namets in Germany, France, Switzerland, Italy 
and Portugal. The team currently has 25 players 
and is comprised of "Catalan/Spanish and" 
foreign players. I guess Ultimate is still a bit of a 
beach thing in Spain because both Pio Pio and the 
Bravas practice on the beach, bare foot, all the 
time. The sun in Spain is great, but one of the 
drawbacks is its effect on grass fields! The Bravas 
also organize a beach hat tournament that was 
first hosted in the fall of 1998 and has since 
become the infamous last European Outdoor tour- 
nament of the year. They're working on bringing in 
more women and getting a juniors team started at 
a local school to try to raise interest and ensure 
that Ultimate will continue. 

The internet age helped contribute to the for- 
mation of Los Quijotes from Madrid. They began 
playing in December of last year after several 
requests came to the Bravas and Eurodisc mailing 
lists requesting information about ultimate in 
Madrid. With 6 names to start with, things 
seemed to take off when Juan Carlos, a Madrileño 
who learned to play ultimate while studying in 
England, took charge of motivating and 
organasing. They have not yet participated in any 
tournaments and are still in the tenuous stages of 
team creation since many members of the initial 
group have moved out of Madrid, including Juan 
Carlos. Hopefully things will keep moving and 
we'll see more ultimate from them in the future. 
Finally, and most recently, a team was started in 
Tenerife, another of the Canary Islands. A lone 
flying Italian initiated a university ultimate course 
last spring in which a group of about 15 students 
participated. The first real competition between 
two Spanish teams has also evolved out of this 
effort with the 2 Canary Island teams traveling to 
play against each other a few times and a final 
competition organized at the end of the course. 
The University de La Laguna, where they also 
have the luxury of grass fields, will offer a year- 
long course again in the upcoming academic 
year. It looks like a lot is happening quickly with 
Ultimate in Tenerife! 

The Spanish team at WUGC 2000 is comprised of 
4 players from Gran Canaria, 1 player from 
Madrid, and 14 players from Barcelona. With so 
few players in the entire country, the selection 
process essentially boiled down to those who 
were interested, eligible, could afford it, and were 
willing to commit to playing and having fun. 
Maybe not the most stringent criteria, but hey, it's 
a start! There are 3 women playing with the team 
since there are not enough women (yet) to form a 
mixed or women's team. Since this is the first time 
Spain is participating, we really don't know what to 
expect. Our main goal is to have as much fun as 
possible and to play as hard as we can. Apart from 
that, we want to find out what diving on the grass 
is all about, see how fast we can run when not in 
15 centimeters of sand, and see if it's possible to 
avoid blisters with those cleats we're supposed to 
wear. No matter what, we're all ready and really 
excited to be here! Kaleen Moriarty, Team España 

WUGC Heilbronn 2000 - T-shirt

Some people exchanged T-shirts after the tournament with participants from other countries. I am glad I didn´t and kept mine.

World Ultimate Frisbee Championship - Heilbronn 2000 (ii)

The tournament`s opening ceremony was in the afternoon of Saturday 5th August. Since I was living in the UK at the time, I somehow managed to join the British team on their trip which really simplified my travel arrangements. I drove to London on Friday evening, staying a few hours in the flat of a friend of a friend until we got on a taxi to Heathrow in the wee hours of Saturday. Once in Germany, someone had arranged a bus from the airport to Heilbronn.

Incidentally, this was the first time for me in Germany (except for a couple of airport transfers in Frankfurt en route to and from Moscow a few years earlier). Little I knew then that I would end up moving to Berlin the following year.

Regarding the seedings and the initial round robin schedule see below. Games were finished at 15 points or at a given time. On our first day, we managed to score just 2 points against GB, however one of points was by one of the women in our team, I cannot remember who. I remember though that someone in the British team got really annoyed about that. No idea about the score with Denmark in the afternoon.

For the second day, the then world champions, Canada, had an early training session with us (15-0) and then in the afternoon we finally managed to win a game, 7-15 against Taiwan. That was on Monday 7th August 2000.

World Ultimate Frisbee Championship - Heilbronn 2000

It´s now twenty years since WUCG 2000 in Heilbronn, the world ultimate frisbee championship in which Spain was participating for the first time (as far as I know). I was very lucky to be part of the Spanish team and have very fond memories of the whole experience.

I first played Ultimate frisbee in high school, which at the time was very unusual in Spain (and probably still is?). Then I didn´t play for many years until I went to England as an Erasmus student in 98. I joined a great group of people coached and led by Aaron Altmann, who was the soul of Alien Nation, the Ultimate frisbee team at Cranfield University. Back in Madrid the following year, I helped founding Los Quijotes in Madrid in mid/late 1999 while serving in the Air Force (conscription was still a thing back then), until I left for UK in early 2000 to work for Rolls-Royce. There was no team in Derby, so I joined a team from Nottingham, SuperFly. Then I moved to Berlin in late 2001 and joined Discipuli, one of teams training at TiB1848, with which I continued playing for a few years.

So this week will be a bit of a throwback, posting some memorabilia that I kept from WUGC 2000 all these years.