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.