Turns out the sci-fi filmmakers got it backwards. All those ’70s and ’80s dystopias like “Rollerball,” “The Running Man,” “Death Race 2000,” imagined futures in which sports were full of gadgets and gimmicks like armored cars, rocket-powered motorbikes, and electrified arenas.
In reality, we got the opposite — the padding’s gone, and the high-tech monitoring equipment is nowhere to be found. Instead, we have “Run It Straight,” a brutally literal content in where two competitors, standing around 50 feet apart, sprint into each other at full-speed with the aim of knocking their opponent to the ground.
Maybe it makes a certain grim sense. In an era of plummeting attention spans and vertical video scrolls, who could expect viewers to sit through an entire football game when the core combat loop can be distilled down to a series of meaty collisions — especially when they’re probably busy placing bets on Polymarket?
The “sport,” if you decide to call it that, has its origins in the backyard wrestling tradition of Australia and New Zealand. It’s now represented by a handful of growing leagues like RunIt Championship League and Run Nation Championship.
The latter, RNC, recently sold over 5,000 tickets to its second annual national competition, an event that’s likely to sell out the 5,500-seat arena its being held in, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation has reported.
“It’s how I play football, you know… the contact, the energy,” Australian rugby player and Run It Straight competitor Lochlan Piper told the outlet. “I like the violence of it.”
If the participants are excited to collide into each other like Rhinos jousting in the South Saharan steppe, medical experts aren’t convinced.
“Medical practitioners and the sporting community have become increasingly concerned about concussion, and aware of mild traumatic brain injury as sometimes not being mild and being a devastating part of people’s lives,” sports neurologist Rowena Mobbs told the ABC.
Though RNC’s organizer has sprinkled in a few rules to explicitly avoid head-to-head contact, Mobbs says no amount of bureaucracy can really make it safe to run straight into another person without padding or a helmet. “Certainly every time they run up and clash in that way, there’s likely to be at least a microscopic brain injury,” she said.
At least one 19-year old is already dead as a direct result of injuries sustained from Run It Straight. Still, some athletes don’t seem particularly phased.
“Every sport has their pros and cons, it’s a contact sport. I’m used to playing rugby league and used to that contact,” pro Rugby player Jayden young told ABC. “No one’s going into this sport thinking accidents or things can’t happen, we’re well aware of the sacrifices and the risks we’re taking.”
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