"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 inwhere 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"
Run It Straight is a new, minimalist contest in which two competitors start about 50 feet apart and sprint into each other at full speed to knock the opponent down. The format strips away equipment and technology common in earlier fictional visions of futuristic sports and focuses on raw collisions. The contest grew from backyard wrestling in Australia and New Zealand and now has small leagues like RunIt Championship League and Run Nation Championship. Run Nation recently sold over 5,000 tickets for a national event in a 5,500-seat arena. Participants praise the contact and energy, while medical experts warn about concussion and mild traumatic brain injury risks.
Read at Futurism
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