Worlds this year showed that Ultimate Frisbee is on the rise in South America, especially in Colombia. After ten years without participation, Colombia sent teams to five of six divisions (only Australia, Canada, Great Britain, Japan and the United States had more teams). Both their Open and Women teams made it to the quarter finals, and also their Juniors achieved impressive results with a fourth place for the girls and a fifth for the boys.
This outstanding performance certainly doesn't come from nothing. With around 1000 active Ultimate players, Colombia is the largest Ultimate Frisbee community in South America (with Venezuela not far behind). And surely there are competitive Ultimate tournaments, such like this month's featured tournament: the Disco Volador 2600. Juan Manuel Perdigón and Diego Polania kindly answered the following questions, presenting the biggest Ultimate tournament in South America.
Disco Volador 2600 emerged when trying to organise a national tournament for Colombia in the year 2000. At the time there hasn't been any governing body to take care of the organisation, so we created the Colombian Ultimate Association (ACU). The first 4 tournaments (from 2000 to 2003) were hosted by ACU and featured an Open as well as a Women's division with about 15 teams in total. But the ACU never gained a foothold and died eventually.
In 2004, a bunch of people that used to work with ACU decided to create the Disco Volador 2600, now with 24 teams. The founding members were Maria Botero, Mauricio Martinez, Diego Polanía, Juan Pablo Zuluaga and Juan Manuel Perdigón; all of them are still involved in the organisation of the now highest level Ultimate tournament that Latin America offers.
In 2005, a new division got introduced called Elite. Here the best and most experienced teams compete, no matter men or women. The Open division is meant for new teams that are learning to play.
Disco Volador 2600 grew significantly during the last three, four years: In 2006 31 teams participated at our tournament in the three division Elite, Open and Women. In 2007 we had already 42 teams competing on 10 Ultimate fields, and approximately 25 people as staff. This year we are including the Elite division for Women.
At the beginning we accepted all the teams that showed up or manifested their interest to participate. Today, we define a team number limit for the Open divisions, then it's first to come, first to be served. The Elite divisions is on invitation only: we invite the teams that we consider are part of these divisions, plus the winner of the open division of the previous edition.
Every December, Bogotá gets visited by almost 1000 ultimate players from Colombia, Venezuela, and the United States. This year we are expecting teams from Italy and Switzerland as well.
The most important thing that DV2600 offers to players are the excellent polo fields, that had been qualified as the best fields of Latin America. In addition we offer:
Thanks for your kind cooperation, Juan Manuel and Diego. I wish you a huge DV2600 2008! We'll see if Euforia can defend the title in the Elite division, and Revolution in the Categoría Feminia.