It’s hard to see the future… unless you make it yourself.
We are doing just that, and we do it by imagining what will come.
Here is an article that we imagine reading in the future, because of what we did.
DATELINE: JULY 2027
How the Olympics Found a Way Back to Young People — Without Esports
After years of false starts, the International Olympic Committee has quietly embraced a radically inclusive new sport. Its rise tells a larger story about why esports, despite billions in investment, never quite became part of the Olympic future.
For most of the past decade, the Olympic movement appeared to be chasing its own digital shadow.
As viewing figures aged and younger audiences drifted toward platforms the International Olympic Committee neither controlled nor fully understood, the answer seemed obvious: esports. Competitive video gaming promised youth relevance, global scale, and digital fluency. Saudi Arabia’s entry into the sector, with sovereign-scale investment and a willingness to fund loss-making infrastructure, appeared to remove the last remaining obstacle.
And yet, by the middle of the 2020s, the Olympic esports project had stalled.
What replaced it was not another gaming partnership, nor a rebranded digital spectacle, but something far more unexpected: a new sport, designed from first principles to answer the question esports never could — how to involve millions of young people as participants, not only spectators.
That sport is known as The Everyone Sport, or E-ONE.
The Esports Paradox
At its height, global esports attracted audiences in the tens of millions. Stadiums filled. Streaming numbers soared. Prize pools ballooned. Saudi-backed organisers consolidated leagues and tournaments under a single, well-funded umbrella.
But behind the spectacle, the structure never changed.
Publishers retained ownership of the games. Rules shifted at commercial discretion. Competitive pathways narrowed rather than widened. Participation remained geographically uneven and sharply exclusive.
Esports, it turned out, was very good at producing stars — and very poor at producing global sport citizens.
For the IOC, whose legitimacy rests on universality, governance, and physical sport, this proved fatal. Esports could be watched everywhere, but played meaningfully by relatively few. It was global entertainment, not a global sporting system.
When Saudi backing quietly receded from Olympic-aligned esports initiatives, the illusion collapsed. What remained was a vacuum.
A Different Starting Point
The Everyone Sport did not emerge from the esports industry at all.
Its architect, Victor Bond, approached the problem from a different direction: not “How do we make gaming Olympic?” but “What would a truly universal sport look like in a digital age?”
The answer, counterintuitively, involved virtual reality — but not in the way Silicon Valley had imagined it.
At the centre of E-ONE is a single discipline, Racket:Next, played in VR but requiring full-body movement, reaction, balance, and endurance. Individual competition takes place in a two-metre physical play area, wherever there is WiFi. There are no avatars performing superhuman feats; the player’s body does the work.
More radical still is the competition model. Players do not eliminate one another… teams do.
Players compete individually, but their scores contribute to teams that can number in the hundreds or thousands… or millions — schools, cities, regions, even entire nations.
There are no tryouts. No cuts. No benches.
Anyone who shows up plays, and contributes meaningfully, with their skill and – for the first time ever – their EFFORT.
Why the IOC Took Notice
For years, Olympic officials had been told that youth engagement required surrendering sport governance to commercial platforms. E-ONE presented a different proposition: digital-native sport without publisher sovereignty, which Racket:Next’s developer was happily willing to concede.
Rules were fixed and managed exclusively by the IOC. Hardware requirements standardised and costs minimised. Participation scaled horizontally rather than vertically. Most importantly, the model preserved something esports never could — collective Olympic meaning.
When early competition pilots showed participation numbers dwarfing those of traditional youth programmes, and when national Olympic committees realised they could field teams of unprecedented size without diluting competition or player engagement, attitudes shifted.
Quietly at first, then openly, the IOC began treating E-ONE not as an experiment, but as a solution.
The Saudi Contrast
Saudi Arabia’s role in esports remains significant. State-backed tournaments continue to dominate the esports “professional” calendar, and elite competition has arguably never been more polished.
But the limits of that model are now clear.
Money can build spectacle. It cannot manufacture legitimacy. It cannot impose governance on privately owned games. And it cannot turn massive numbers of viewers into participants.
E-ONE succeeded precisely because it asked less of capital and more of a revolutionary competition structure.
A New Chapter for the Olympics
The IOC’s adoption of The Everyone Sport does not mark the end of esports, nor was it intended to. Competitive gaming remains culturally powerful and commercially relevant.
What it marks instead is a clear boundary, and the beginning of something new in the world of sport.
Esports is gamified, sport-like entertainment.
E-ONE is sport.
In an era when institutions are struggling to connect with younger generations without hollowing themselves out, the Olympic movement has stumbled, learned, and — adapted.
Not by chasing youth culture.
But by involving millions of young people in sport itself, and in Olympic culture.
