{mosimage}Is it a sport? Is it a reality show? It’s
Leet! A couple of years ago, a young Finnish entrepreneur Jaakko Mäki-Petäjä
thought that it would be a good idea to create a new sport. But how to make
people play it? Easy! Recruit teams around the world, take them to a reality TV
show and offer a one million dollars reward. That’s the Leet challenge.
What it looked like a crazy idea late at
night, which would be soon developed into an adventurous business opportunity.
Jaakko and his partners at Spring Sports Ltd, Keni Simola and Iiro Lahdenranta,
met with top executives of the sports and media industry, like Formula 1 chief
Bernie Ecclestone and British television producer Mark Burnett. A few months
later, they were ready to present Leet to the world.
Justin Chacona, Marketing Manager for
Spring Sports, is the first face in front of the Leet cameras. He briefly
explains the concept of the new game: “The sport itself is played with a plastic stick
with which players can receive, carry and pass a rubber ball. Two teams of up
to ten players, only four of which may be on the playing surface for each team
at any given point, must try to surge past their oppositions’ defense to reach
the goals located high in the air at each end of the fifty-five yard long
arena.”
This
concept reminds Rollerball, the old sci-fi film from the seventies, but Leet is
not about smashing heads and slaughtering the opponent. “While essentially a
non-contact sport in nature”, continues Justin, “Leet is specifically designed
to exploit the best of one’s speed, agility, and hand-eye coordination. Hard,
rough, and full of non-stop movement, Leet can be enjoyed and played in your
backyard (where ‘Street Leet’ rules apply) or on top of the world in the
international Leet arena.”
{sidebar id=11}Start training
But before the competition, it was
necessary to create the rules and have someone to instruct the players. The
Leet team needed a trainer so they hired Coach Flanagan who became the fourth
member of the company. He spent one thousand man hours creating the rulebook,
travelling to China to test the prototypes of the sticks.
To spread Leet, the necessary equipment
(the stick and the ball) will be sold through the web in January. Then everyone
can start training and preparing for the TV show. Filming will start in the
autumn of 2008, but you can already pre-register your team at www.leet.tv There you can already take a glimpse
of what Leet is about, but expect a full launch of the website in less than one
week.