Home FLASHES The wizards’ Quidditch is now a gender-equal muggle sport

The wizards’ Quidditch is now a gender-equal muggle sport

543
0

From the pages of Harry Potter, the game of Quidditch has come down from the magical sky to the earthly grounds.

The Birth of ‘Muggle’ Quidditch

In 2005, Xander Manshel and Alex Benepe brought Quidditch to life in Middlebury at Vermont in the United States. As per Benepe’s Speech at TEDxUCLA….

“Now we’re going to 2005 to Middlebury College in Vermont, where I was a freshman. The fourth Harry Potter movie was about to hit theaters and the audiences had already been wowed by depictions of the fantastical flying sport of Quidditch in the first three films. A very common interaction took place over a lunchtime discussion. My friends came up with an idea: what if we tried to play Quidditch in real life?

We developed a simple but bizarre set of rules. For one, you would run around on the field holding a broomstick between your legs with one hand. The quaffle would be a volleyball. The bludger and bats would be simplified into dodge balls. And the snitch — this was the hard part — we decided to make it a person with a tail hanging out the back of their shorts, like flag football.”

This is how the fictional game of Quidditch was adopted in real life and the ‘muggles’ started playing the sport alongside the wizards.

Rules of Quidditch

In real-life Quidditch, The pitch is rectangular rather than oval-shaped as in the fictional game. There are three hoops of varying heights at either end.

A team consists of a minimum of seven players, of which six are always on the pitch. Three of them are chasers, one is the keeper, and the remaining two are the beaters. The seventh player is the seeker who joins each team after 17 minutes of the match.

Most importantly, teams are required to be gender-balanced. Each team may have a maximum of four players who identify as the same gender on the field at one time. This makes the muggle Quidditch one of the few sports that promotes gender equality on the pitch.

Quidditch to Quadball

The real-life Quidditch has been renamed Quadball by the international governing organisation in 2023. Broadly, there are two major reasons behind the change of the name.

Firstly, the name Quidditch is trademarked by Warner Bros., thus, limiting the opportunities for growth, exposure and partnerships.

Secondly, the Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling has been accused of being transphobic and the international association has cited her “anti-trans positions” as a reason for the change.

The World Cup

The International Quidditch Association, as it was formerly named, organised the first World Cup in July 2012. The tournament was named the “Summer Games” following its unofficial tie-in to the 2012 Summer Olympics.

The tournament was held at Oxford in the United Kingdom as the Olympic Torch was passing through the city. Australia, Canada, France, the UK, and the USA participated in the inaugural edition with USA emerging as the winner.

Since then, there have been four editions of the Quidditch World Cup. The USA won four times while Australia won once. 

Previous articleParis hosts the first outdoor opening ceremony of Paralympics
Next articleAnna Ushenina- Ukraine’s first woman world chess champion
PoulomiKundu started her career in 2000 as a freelance journalist in Hindustan Times. Soon after she was selected an intern in Zee News, Kolkata. After her post- graduation in English, Poulomi joined the leading television production house of eastern India, Rainbow Productions. She was a journalist in Khas Khobor, a Bengali news magazine programme in Doordarshan and also headed the post production department of another programme, Khas Kolkata. In 2004, Poulomi moved to Delhi as a creative writer in an advertising agency, Brand Stewards Pvt. Ltd. In 2005, she again shifted her base for a better opportunity and that in Mumbai. There she got the job in Raa Media Pvt Ltd. as an associate director of two programmes for Doordarshan-Yuva and Paisa Vasool. In the meantime, she also wrote features in DNA as a freelancer. Poulomi directs promotional videos, develops scripts for films for Corporate and NGOs. But an ardent sports lover, Poulomi always had an urge to contribute somewhere in the field of sports. Her love for sports started from an early age when she played gully cricket and football for local teams. Academics and professional hazards sometimes took her away from her passion, but it never died in her. She always nurtured the never-ending dream. So she materialized her dream in the form of ‘SPORTSAVOUR’. It is an online sports portal that serves sports with the tagline ‘For the indigenous, unconventional, unknown’.

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here