A little over 130 years after the founding of the International Olympic Committee, a new competition series wants to pit national teams against each other in the applied-science arena.
The World Technology Games is planning to host its first gathering in 2026, with possible events including a robotics pentathlon, autonomous car races, esports competitions and sustainability-focused challenges. The venture is identifying a host city for 2026, including Asia, Europe and the Middle East as potential destinations. WTG has also brought on Team Playmaker as its commercial representation, with the goal of getting multinational tech brands on board as well.
“I think when the book’s written on the 21st century, the winner is going to be the winner of the technology race, not the 10,000 meters,” WTG CEO Alexander Brown said, arguing for the importance of celebrating today’s great thinkers, most of whom are not as famous as the world’s top athletes.
“In this country alone, 72% of the people can’t name a living scientist,” he added. In total, WTG hopes to entertain a global audience of 700 million people “we like to call Gen T,” Brown said, including tech industry employees.
Some of the competitions will be run by existing sporting bodies, while others will be created for the WTG, with TV in mind. Those will likely feature national representatives facing off in single-day events.
WTG events will be held annually and run alongside the World Technology Festival and World Technology Summit. “Coachella meets CES,” Brown said.
“Instead of us celebrating the athlete or the artist, we want to celebrate the technologist,” Team Playmaker managing partner Matt Grandis said. “The combination of competitions, festivals, tech showcases, panels, thought leadership, etc., all make this a very unique and interesting property for the marketplace.”
WTG has retained Meadowlark Media and former ESPN president John Skipper to help oversee its media strategy.
At the same time, other organizations are looking at applying traditional sporting models to the digital world—and often finding interest from the Persian Gulf. The inaugural Olympic Esports Games will be held in Saudi Arabia in 2025 (and remain there for 12 years), while the first Esports World Cup took place in Riyadh this summer. There is even a Microsoft Excel World Championship now; the 2024 event just concluded in Las Vegas.
Other science and engineering competitions—such as the Shell Eco-marathon or the Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair—have generally focused on pre-college and higher education entrants without a global media distribution component of the business.
