For The 2028 Olympics, Modern Pentathlon Has Gone ‘Ninja Warrior’

With a hip new obstacle racing event and a prime place on the L.A. Olympics schedule, modern pentathlon is suddenly cool again.

It’s been a while coming. A century after Pierre de Coubertin conjured up five tests of good modern soldiering — fencing, swimming, running, shooting, and horseback riding — and made the whole thing an Olympic sport, modern pentathlon was seen as a bit antiquated. But the sport has gotten a makeover — “Horses out, Ninja Warrior in,” as the Associated Press put it — and is already basking in the effect.

In effect, obstacle course racing has replaced equestrian show jumping as one of modern pentathlon’s five events. The other four are still based on skills an overall soldier was thought to need circa 1912. Obstacle course racing, which does has military origins, adds a certain 21st century flavor. The new event, a 70 meter course with eight obstacles that elite athletes are clearing in 25-35 adrenaline-packed seconds, debuted in World Cup competition earlier this year.

“Our athletes are the most versatile athletes in the Games,” proclaimed Rob Stull, president of the International Modern Pentathlon Union, the sport’s governing body known by its French acronym UIPM. That versatility has included athletes accepting the change after some initial consternation — among others, Tokyo Olympic champion Joe Choong led the opposition. Despite indicating that he would retire with the horses in Paris last summer, Choong has remained in the sport. “We have to accept it or move on,” he told the BBC earlier this year. And while he acknowledges that obstacle racing is “fun,” Choong is still warming to it. “It’s definitely something I’m going to get stuck in with and crack on with, but I’m not sure relishing is quite the word,” he said.

Stull, a three-time Olympian and self-described “horse guy” who grew up on a farm outside Washington D.C., understands. In the end, modern pressures, such as the cost of transporting horses, an unsavory incident at the Tokyo Olympics where a coach allegedly punched a horse, and the need to draw a wider TV audience combined to force UPIM’s hand. So far things have been going relatively well, at least by one metric. “I don’t get pelted with tomatoes when I show up at events,” Stull said. “More than anything, I get a lot of thank yous.”

At the cool kids’ table

For a federation trying to draw attention amidst the pomp of an Olympics, obstacle course racing checks several boxes. The discipline has big name recognition thanks to Ninja Warrior, the Japanese TV show that became a global phenomenon and spawned adaptations in more than 160 countries. (The original Japanese show, Sasuke, is still on.) Taking that and incorporating it into the Olympics is “a no-brainer,” said David Hill, the former Fox Sports Chairman in a promotional video released by UIPM. “It takes modern pentatlon from being virtually unwatchable straight to prime time.” Stull defers to official nomenclature, but has been known to trade on the TV designation when describing the new event. “The easiest thing for me to say is ‘ninja,’ because that’s really what we’re much more in line with,” he said. “The second you say that, people understand what you’re talking about.”

Yet obstacle racing wasn’t the guaranteed winner when UIPM opened itself up to proposals for a new event. The federation was inundated with ideas — a total of 62 crossed his desk, Stull says, and we’ll never know just how close we came to having pillow fighting in the Olympics. (Stull: “I thought it was a joke when it was submitted, but it’s not. And if you watch it, they really beat the crap out of each other.”) Cyclocross, where competitors ride and carry their bikes as they navigate obstacles, was a more viable candidate, though the needle eventually landed on obstacle.

The change was approved by the International Olympic Committee, which governed modern pentathlon itself until 1948. While the IOC did not push UIPM toward ninja, Stull says, it made it clear to federation leadership that something had to change. “The IOC tries to remain neutral, but they were certainly sending the messages that we needed to innovate the sport,” Stull said. “They didn’t tell us to pick obstacle. They just knew that the equestrian piece was a challenge for us and would not allow us to have the accessibility or fit into the cost model moving forward. We had that challenge in front of us, and we needed to bail ourselves out.”

The new event has contributed to giving modern pentathlon something of a new lease on life. It was added to the list of LA 2028 sports late in 2023. Better still, it will be contested during the opening days of the Olympics, when the world’s attention tends to be riveted on the Games even though most sports are still deep in preliminary competition.

“We’ll have our two medals out in the first four days. So yes, that’ll help us. We have an extra day of broadcasting — that’ll help us,” Stull said. So will modern pentatlon’s proximity to urban sports like BMX and 3×3 basketball, the Olympic equivalent of finding yourself eating at the same cafeteria table as the popular people in high school. “We’re with the cool kids,” Stull affirmed proudly.

This is an improvement from recent Olympiads, when modern pentathlon was held in the Games’s waning days. “That’s a big deal for us, because when you’re at the end of the Games, you’re competing against sports like the men’s gold medal basketball game,” Stull said. That new athletes may be drawn to modern pentathlon via obstacle racing is another obvious perk.

Stull still wants some tweaking done to optimize the event before Los Angeles. No one to date has failed to scale the finish wall in competition, he noted, so the wall may be raised to make the final moments of the race even more spectacular and suspenseful. But those are small things. The foundation for the future has been laid.

What would de Coubertin make of it all? “He would say, ‘you’re welcome,’” Stull said. An innovator himself, the baron “absolutely would have recognized the need for change.”