The 33tours (a rather lousy French play on words involving vinyl speed and another piece of spinning plastic) is Bordeaux’s resident Ultimate Frisbee team.

What is Ultimate Frisbee?

It’s a 7-a-side mixed (girls and boys) team sport based on a firm idea of fair-play (no ref and so no cheating) which is played on a pitch roughly the same size of a traditional football pitch. The sport originates in it’s current form from Canada during the early 1980’s and the French Ultimate Frisbee federation now numbers well over a hundred teams.

The Bordeaux teams trains at home and then takes part in a range of beach, grass and indoor championships throughout France and the north of Spain. The sport is intense, the 7 players need to pass the frisbee between themselves without interceptions from the opposing team or ‘drops’ (shameful fumbles of the disc which means it hits the ground and gets turned over to the other team) and without running with the disc (which requires fancy disc throws) and then catch the disc in an ‘end-zone’ at the far end of the pitch to score a point. Games last between 45 and 90 minutes depending on the discipline.

The 33tours were founded in 2003 by Sylvain Ribailler, who brought the sport to the region from Paris, and the team has been going from strength to strength ever since. This year sees them completing in the French Division 3 and if all goes well this coming weekend during the finals in Fontenay-le-Compte (Vendée) the 33tours will be moving up to Division 2 for the next season.

If you want to find out a little more about the sport, visit our website at http://ultimate33.com. You can even hook up to our Twitter channel at http://twitter.com/33tours for live info.

Training happens every Wednesday at 19h, Terrain 16 at the sports installation at Bordeaux Lac.

Send our admin and coaching team an email at contact@ultimate33.com if you need any more information.

Article written by Ben Frank.