They became the first

On Sunday, Games of the Future came to an end in Kazan — the first multisport tournament, where participants competed both in the physical and digital dimensions. The unprecedented event brought together about two thousand athletes from 107 countries at its venues. Belarusians were among them. Despite the fact that the competition format is completely new, our athletes managed to come into the spotlight quite a few times. They performed in several disciplines — phygital basketball, hockey and martial arts, robot battle and drone racing, World of Tanks, sports programming, virtual cycling. In the latter discipline, the first set of medals was awarded. The riders of the Minsk team — Anna Terekh, Taisa Naskovich, Mikhail Shemetov and Evgeny Sobol — became the holders of the first-ever Games of the Future trophy.

Andrei Stasevich

Twelve four-member teams competed in the virtual cycling race, and the competition was really high — Olympic Games medallists, world and European champions came to the tournament. All of them had to go through several stages in 
the WattAttack simulator — individual time trial, elimination, scratch, tempo races and 30km criterium. The victory
of the Belarusian athletes turned out to be very convincing. They scored 522 points, beating the nearest competitor,
the Marathon–Tula team, by 53 points! Italian Espresso took third place, gaining 425 points. The multiple champion 
of Belarus in cycling, winner of prestigious international cycling stage races Evgeny Sobol told TASS, “There is a Russian film about Gagarin, where he says, ‘Thousands will fly, but they will remember the first one.’ It is the same for us!”
In some types of the programme, our athletes were part of multinational teams. For example, in hockey, Belarusian players were involved in two teams that got on the podium. Dmitry Nikolaenya and Artyom Nesterov became silver medallists of Games of the Future with COSMOS X17, and Nasser Sobhy took third place with Ak Bars. In the phygital martial arts tournament, Belarusian fighter Alexander Kovalev claimed second place with Gor Union. The winner 
of the pankration and MMA World Championships shared his impressions, “I will definitely remember Games of the Future, although the performance turned out not quite the way I had imagined.” At the tournament, Sasha was to face one of the strongest Muay Thai fighters from Russia, Khayal Dzhaniev. In the cyber version of the Mortal Kombat game, the Belarusian did not leave a single chance to his opponent, defeating him with a 5:0 score. However, the actual fight in the octagon did not take place — Dzhaniev did not cut weight and simply did not fit into his category. As a result, Alexander Kovalev brought his team the maximum possible 11 points.
“I had been seriously preparing and it is a pity that the fight did not take place. At the same time, I do not regret that
I took part in Games of the Future. Even though I did not get a chance to feel the full charm of these competitions, this format is interesting to me. Everything was at a high level in Kazan. It is difficult to say now whether I will participate in such competitions in the future — it depends on how my professional career will develop,” Alexander Kovalev said.


Nafis Sirazetdinov

After the end of the phygital martial arts tournament, Alexander wanted to watch the matches of our basketball players — the Exponenta team, which included Belarusians Kirill Volodkin, Vaclav Bugaev and Roman Verobey, as well as Russian Daniil Pigul. Alas, not everything worked out for them in Kazan. In the first match, the guys defeated their rivals from the Argentine–Venezuelan Caribbean Squad — 27:22; then they lost minimally to the Chinese MDMX — 24:26. In the 1/8 finals, our team competed with Madagascar’s Antananarivo and produced a thriller match. The Belarusians lost in the cyber part — 12:19, but on the real basketball court they made a comeback — 15:8, and made the score equal in the entire confrontation.
The outcome of the match was decided in a series of free throws, where the basketball players from Madagascar won by a margin of one point. Despite the bitter loss in a close match, leader of the Exponenta team Kirill Volodkin assured, 
when summing up the results, that they had only positive impressions of the tournament. The athlete believes that such competitions will gain popularity, “Phygital football, basketball, and hockey tournaments are watched by a large number of viewers. I think that the number of such competitions will only increase in the future. Children now spend a lot of time in front of computers, and such tournaments help to engage them in physical activities — to play football, basketball, hockey. Hopefully, this will lead to children being more involved in sports activities.”
Belarusians also performed in non-sports disciplines. The Crazy Bunny Lab team, for example, competed in a robot battle. In the first fight, it lost to the Russian Big Brother, then defeated the Brazilian Braabots and fought for the final 9–12 places. Team captain Yuri Kozlov noted that they had gained tremendous experience at the tournament, seen their weaknesses and knew what they needed to work on. “We are going to continue to take an active part in such 
tournaments. The plan is to refine this robot and develop a new one that will be ten times better, with improved control and a more dangerous weapon. We want to prove that Belarus can put up serious resistance in the arena,” Yuri Kozlov told TASS.

TO THE POINT

Games of the Future have already gone down in history, but the first innovative tournament will not be the last one.
The head of the project, Igor Stolyarov revealed that the Games will be held next year outside Russia. Later, Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian Federation Dmitry Chernyshenko noted that nine countries had already expressed their desire to host the sports show. 
At the closing ceremony, everyone was looking forward to the announcement of the host of the second Games. After all, handing over the flag of the competition is one of the traditions of the starts at such a level. However, the venue of the next tournament has not yet been disclosed. Dmitry Chernyshenko made a speech at the closing ceremony, “Today Kazan bids farewell to the tournament, but for Games of the Future, it is just the beginning. We pass the baton to new cities and countries to delight athletes and spectators all over the world, and involve as many people as possible in the new phygital movement. Forward, to the future!”

By Tatiana Pastushenko