- published: 21 Dec 2011
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Ultimate is a sport played with a flying disc. The object of the game is to score points by passing the disc to a player in the opposing end zone, similar to an end zone in American football or rugby. Players may not run with the disc, and may only move one foot (pivot) while holding the disc.
While originally called ultimate frisbee, it is now officially called ultimate in many areas because Frisbee is registered in some areas as a trademark, albeit genericized, for the line of discs made by the Wham-O toy company. In 2008, there were 4.9 million Ultimate players in the US.
In the fall of 1968, Joel Silver, a student at Columbia High School in Maplewood, New Jersey proposed a school Frisbee team to the student council on a whim. The following summer, a group of students got together to play what Silver claimed to be the "ultimate game experience", adapting the sport from a form of Frisbee football, likely learned from Jared Kass while attending a summer camp at Northfield Mount Hermon, Massachusetts, where Kass was teaching. The proportion of rules developed by Kass, and those developed by Silver, is disputed. It was discovered in 2003 that the game that Kass and Silver played may have been more similar to Ultimate than had been thought. Regardless, the students who played and codified the rules at Columbia High School were an eclectic group of students, including participants in academics, student politics, the student newspaper, and school dramatic productions. Key early contributors besides Silver included Bernard "Buzzy" Hellring and Jonny Hines. Another member of the original team was Walter Sabo, who went on to be a major figure in the American radio business. The sport became identified as a counterculture activity. The first definitive history of the sport was published in December 2005, ULTIMATE: The First Four Decades.
Ultimate(s), penultimate or antepenultimate may refer to:
Sport (or, in the United States, sports) is all forms of competitive physical activity which, through casual or organised participation, aim to use, maintain or improve physical fitness and provide entertainment to participants. Hundreds of sports exist, from those requiring only two participants, through to those with hundreds of simultaneous participants, either in teams or competing as individuals.
Sport is generally recognised as activities which are based in physical athleticism or physical dexterity, with the largest major competitions such as the Olympic Games admitting only sports meeting this definition, and other organisations such as the Council of Europe using definitions precluding activities without a physical element from classification as sports. However, a number of competitive, but non-physical, activities claim recognition as mind sports. The International Olympic Committee (through ARISF) recognises both chess and bridge as bona fide sports, and SportAccord, the international sports federation association, recognises five non-physical sports, although limits the amount of mind games which can be admitted as sports.