The WTWF Mission: Getting Toe Wrestling to the Olympics

Most people laugh when they first hear the words “toe wrestling.” Fair enough - we did too. It sounds like a pub joke, the kind of thing you bring up at the end of the night to see who’s brave enough to try. But then you watch it properly. Then you try it. And suddenly it stops being funny in the casual way and becomes funny in the human way - because you’re locked into a one-on-one battle, feeling every ounce of resistance, adrenaline and stubborn pride that shows up in any real sport. You realise fast that toe wrestling is simple to understand, but not simple to win.

Toe wrestling has been here before. In the 1990s it had a genuine golden era. Back then, George Burgess (the then landlord of Ye Olde Royal Oak in Wetton) found a Toedium in his pub attic along with a set of rules. Legend says that platform might have been built decades earlier. What mattered was that George didn’t treat it like a novelty. He treated it like a sport worth reviving. Under his watch the World Toe Wrestling Championship became a real international pilgrimage. Competitors travelled to Wetton from all over the world and the village lit up every year with the kind of atmosphere you only get when something small suddenly feels important. After a decade George passed the torch to Ben & Jerry’s, who pushed toe wrestling beyond Wetton and into festivals around the UK. The sport moved past being a once-a-year curiosity and started to feel like it might spread for real.

Then, like a lot of niche sports, it drifted. Over the next couple of decades momentum slowed, crowds shrank, fewer locals turned up, and toe wrestling slipped back into obscurity. The championship kept going, largely because a handful of people refused to let it die, but it was surviving more than it was growing.

In 2023 we found it. Journalist/producer Elizabeth McCafferty and Amity Studio founders Connor Griffin and Ben Hale discovered toe wrestling and started documenting its history. The deeper we went, the more obvious it became that this wasn’t just a weird tradition clinging to life. The characters were brilliant, the history was rich, and the sport itself had genuine challenge baked into it. Toe wrestling asks for technique, strength in very specific muscle groups, flexibility, control, pain tolerance, strategy, and the kind of competitive nerve that only shows up when someone is trying to beat you in front of a crowd. Yet at the same time it’s so accessible that almost anyone can step onto a Toedium and have a real match. That combination - low barrier to entry, high ceiling of mastery - is the DNA of sports that travel.

So we joined forces with the people who’ve kept toe wrestling alive and competitive: Alan “Nasty” Nash, who’s been battling since 1994 and has become the sport’s stubborn heartbeat and Ben Woodroffe, the current men’s world champion. TWC Toe Wrestling Championship was formed to grow toe wrestling properly. But growth needs a north star. And for us, that north star came from the sport’s own mythology.

Alan told us about George Burgess once talking to journalists in 1997 about getting toe wrestling into the Olympics. Maybe it was a cheeky marketing line at the time. Maybe it was half-dream, half-joke. But to us it felt like the perfect mission - beautiful, ridiculous, and somehow completely right. Because if toe wrestling is going to live, it doesn’t just deserve to survive quietly in a village pub. It deserves to become a global sport. And the Olympics are still the world’s loudest, clearest signal that a sport has crossed from obscure to legitimate.

That word “legitimate” matters. Not because we’re chasing prestige for its own sake, but because the Olympics are the shared global definition of what a “real sport” is. It’s what kids grow up watching. It’s what countries rally behind. The day toe wrestling is in the Games is the day the world collectively stops asking “what is toe wrestling?” and starts saying “that’s a proper sport.” We’re genuinely fascinated by that bigger question too: when does something cross that line? What makes a sport “real”? Toe wrestling is going to be part of the answer.

We’re not naive about where the sport stands right now. Toe wrestling is still small. The number of true professionals could be counted on one hand. But the base is already more international than people assume. Hundreds of people have competed at the TWC World Toe Wrestling Championship, and in 2025 we had athletes travel to Ashbourne from the USA, France, Italy, South Africa, and Australia - the kind of spread that tells us the appetite is real. There are toe wrestling events that have popped up in places like China and Pakistan, and we’re confident there are more happening around the world that we haven’t even seen yet. We’re already talking to people in Australia and the US about formally setting up federations. That’s how sports scale: local scenes become national structures, those structures connect into a global federation, and what once looked like a cult hobby suddenly becomes a worldwide competitive ecosystem.

The growth is happening faster than we expected. Over the last year we’ve more than doubled the number of serious competitors. We expect at least another doubling next year. That kind of compounding is what turns “niche” into “inevitable,” especially in a world where social media can take a tiny sport to a massive audience in a single weekend. Toe wrestling is made for modern culture: it’s instantly understandable, instantly viral, and instantly competitive once you try it. Everyone laughs the first time they see it. Then they play. Then their face changes. They feel the effort, the tension, the pride, the frustration, the rush - and they understand, without needing to be convinced, that this is a sport.

To keep growing cleanly, we’re building the foundations every serious sport needs. We operate under the World Toe Wrestling Federation, and we’re working with the most experienced athletes to finalise and publish a standardised international rule set. We’re improving officiating, safety and athlete welfare as the sport scales, because the athletes are the lifeblood of toe wrestling and always will be. Right now there are no weight classes, and size and weight can be an advantage; as participation expands we expect divisions and categories to emerge naturally, the same way they did in other combat and strength sports. And as the competitive level rises, so will the standards around training and protection.

We’re also lucky to be doing this now. Social platforms mean a sport doesn’t need a century of institutions behind it to become global; it needs a community, a structure, and something real at its core. Toe wrestling has all three. And in an age where AI and automation are reshaping daily life, we think people are going to crave physical challenge, play, and raw human competition more than ever. Toe wrestling is simple, brutal, funny, and deeply human - a sport that reminds you your feet are not just things you stand on but things you can train, master, and fight with.

We’re already working with partners who understand that future. Our main sponsor right now is Vibram FiveFingers, whose mission is to strengthen feet through minimalist footwear. Together we’re exploring training techniques and technology that can help develop toe wrestling athletes for the next era. That partnership isn’t cosmetic. It’s practical. It’s what it looks like when you treat toe wrestling as a real sport before the world has caught up.

So yes - our mission is to get toe wrestling into the Olympics as a full medal sport. One day a toe wrestling champion will stand on an Olympic podium with a gold medal around their neck. That day might be years away. It might be decades away. The first Olympic toe wrestling gold medalists might not even be born yet, and they almost certainly haven’t heard of the sport. But that’s exactly why we’re doing this now. We’re not building toe wrestling for a season. We’re building it for history.

And if you’re reading this thinking, “this sounds insane, but I kind of want to try it,” then you’re already part of the plan.