“To any media Outlet, please! don’t change the format, it is specifically written this way. Thank you”
Florian Gander – Co-Founder & Former Vice President Swiss Stand up paddle Association, Owner @supkultur Co Founder @TheBigPaddle.ch
Made in Spain, Swiss by choice – On the water since 1986
The news broke, and within hours the comment sections were overflowing with disbelief, frustration and anger.
Quite rightly so, in my humble opinion.
So, what happened?
Well, King Aguerre the III has done it again.
No explanation. No apology. No discernible attempt at dialogue. Not even the customary sprinkling of diplomatic nonsense one might normally expect when cancelling a World Championship.
Just, in essence:
“To all the peasants out there: kindly be informed that there shall be no World Championship in 2026. Now kindly, F.. off”
And with that, the royal decree was issued.
In true ISA fashion, His Highness — whose reign has already lasted what feels like several geological periods — has once again managed to remind the stand-up paddling community exactly where it sits in the hierarchy of his kingdom.
Somewhere below everything that swims. Quite far below, actually.
Why there will be no ISA SUP World Championships remains, at the time of writing, something of a mystery. Beyond the now rather famous Instagram reply, there has been precious little in the way of an explanation.
No proper statement.
No transparent reasoning.
No meaningful conversation with the athletes whose careers are directly affected.
But at least one thing is clear: there will be no ISA SUP World Championships in 2026.
It is official.
Anger. Frustration. Disappointment.
Fine.
So what now?
⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻
Spend a little time grazing through the comment sections of the larger SUP media outlets — always a wonderfully uplifting exercise under these circumstances — and something rather curious begins to emerge.
A lot of the biggest names in our sport have said remarkably little.
Look a little closer and the pattern becomes even more interesting.
Very few athletes currently sitting near the top of the rankings, particularly the younger generation, have publicly spoken out.
Why?
Are they not disappointed?
Of course they are.
Are they not frustrated?
I would imagine so.
But there is something considerably more powerful than frustration at work here.
Fear.
For many young athletes, Brisbane 2032 remains a beacon of hope. Even after receiving fairly clear indications that SUP’s Olympic prospects remain uncertain, unlikely, the dream persists.
And frankly, who can blame them?
If there is even the faintest possibility that one day you might walk into an Olympic stadium carrying your country’s flag, you dream.
You train.
You sacrifice.
You organise your entire life around that possibility.
And what would be a rather unwise thing to do while pursuing that dream?
Exactly.
Publicly criticise the organisation holding the key to the door.
The ISA.
And therein lies one of the more uncomfortable realities of our sport.
Ever since the great battle for SUP supremacy between the ISA and the ICF began, stand-up paddling has been divided.
Federations divided.
Events divided.
Athletes divided.
National associations divided.
And, occasionally, friendships divided. (that one is close to my heart)
All in the name of deciding who owns a sport which, rather inconveniently, belongs to none of them.
Because behind all the legal arguments, institutional manoeuvring and increasingly expensive acronyms lies a rather simple truth — at least as I see it:
We are poorly represented by both federations.
The ISA has never made much of a secret of the fact that surfing is its first love. SUP is tolerated at best at the family dinner, occasionally given a remotely decent seat, but nobody is under any illusion as to who inherits the Kingdom.
The ICF, to its credit, has taken a more sustained approach to stand-up paddling and has invested considerably more energy into developing competition structures around the sport.
But let us not confuse attention with identity.
Neither organisation has stand-up paddling written into its DNA.
Neither was created for stand-up paddlers.
Neither has built its international structure from the SUP community upwards.
And both have strategic reasons for wanting control of a (once) rapidly growing global sport with Olympic potential.
That is not necessarily sinister. Federations are institutions. Institutions have interests.
But we should at least be grown-up enough to recognise the distinction between representing a sport and administering an asset.
They are not quite the same thing.
⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻
So what is the solution?
Judging by the overwhelming sentiment expressed over the past 48 hours in hundreds of media comments, the answer sounds wonderfully simple:
We need our own federation.
And yes.
We probably do.
It sounds exciting. It sounds overdue. It sounds wonderfully revolutionary.
Unfortunately, revolutions tend to become considerably less romantic once somebody has to pay the accountants.
Building a credible international federation is not a logo, an Instagram account and twelve enthusiastic people on a WhatsApp group.
It is governance.
Funding.
Administration.
National federations.
Athlete representation.
Continental structures.
Anti-doping compliance.
Safeguarding.
Event standards.
Commercial partnerships.
Legal work.
Political diplomacy.
Years of negotiations.
And money.
A great deal of money.
More importantly, it requires something that may prove even harder to obtain than funding:
Unity.
And that is where SUP has a problem.
Because we are already a deeply fragmented community.
We disagree about race formats.
We disagree about equipment.
We disagree about drafting.
We disagree about prize money.
We disagree about commercial events.
We disagree about federations.
We occasionally appear to disagree about whether people involved in stand-up paddling should be permitted to earn a living from stand-up paddling.
We are, in other words, exceptionally talented at paddling in the same direction while simultaneously pulling one another backwards.
There is an old Spanish saying:
“Pan para hoy, hambre para mañana.”
Bread for today, hunger for tomorrow.
It describes rather perfectly the danger we face now.
We can choose the convenient solution.
Another temporary championship.
Another promoter.
Another organisation promising to fix things.
Another compromise because it keeps everybody reasonably happy for another season.
Bread for today.
Or we can finally have the considerably more difficult conversation about what this sport should look like twenty years from now.
Because perhaps the uncomfortable truth is that SUP is not starving simply because somebody else failed us.
Perhaps we have played our part too.
We have tolerated poor representation.
We have remained silent when speaking was inconvenient.
We have allowed personal interests, commercial rivalries and institutional loyalties to divide a relatively small sporting community.
We have expected other people to build the future while reserving our right to criticise the architecture.
And, when somebody did stand up to challenge the system, we were not always particularly good at standing beside them.
In that sense, stand-up paddling is perhaps not so different from the wider world around us today.
We complain about the institutions we have while rarely accepting responsibility for the institutions we allow to exist.
So yes.
We deserve better.
But perhaps the more important question is:
Have we behaved like a community that deserves it?
Is it too late?
I sincerely hope not.
But opportunities to fundamentally reshape a sport do not appear very often.
And this may be one of them.
Not for today’s champions.
Not for today’s federations.
Not for today’s event organisers.
For the ten-year-old standing on a board somewhere today who might, twenty years from now, inherit whatever we decide to build.
If we get this wrong, they will inherit our arguments.
If we get it right, perhaps they will inherit a sport.
And that, surely, is worth standing up for.