At a point when most rowers are pounding away on rivers in the wind and rain through the dark winter months, a new breed are honing their skills in brighter climes surrounded by sun, sand and waves, all the while dreaming of the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.

Out of 17 sports that proposed an extra discipline to the International Olympic Committee, rowing came out on top with its Beach Sprints format added to the LA 2028 programme. While many may have noticed the addition of five new sports in baseball, cricket, flag football, lacrosse and squash, a mini-revolution is happening on the water within a sport that will no longer have a lightweight category but will have five coastal rowing events in 2028.

Coastal Rowing Beach Sprints shake up this most traditional and predictable of sports by taking the core elements of rowing – a need for extreme levels of fitness and psychological toughness – and adding new layers of jeopardy and a beach-party vibe. The discipline involves a head-to-head format and begins on land with athletes sprinting down the beach and jumping into their boats at the water’s edge, then racing out around a buoy before hurtling back to dry land, leaping out of their boats and sprinting up the beach. With frequent close finishes, their final move is to hurl themselves through the air to hit the finish line buzzer first and land, usually, with a face full of sand.

In a world where people have greater choice over which sports to watch and participate in, and minor sports’ world federations are considering how to stay popular and relevant, coastal rowing offers a less predictable and more entertaining format, while simultaneously reconnecting with a historic activity that dates back to around 1900BC in ancient Egypt where it was a significant mode of transport.

We might be a footballing nation first but this is a great addition for Team GB as we also excel at sitting-down sports and boats are part of our national island identity. We also gain a new impetus to revitalise sport and activity around the coastline in areas that have become some of the most socially and economically challenged parts of each of the home nations. The Welsh government identified that its major sports event funding was going into big cities and realised the importance of reaching and engaging a different part of the population by hosting the Coastal Rowing world championships in Saundersfoot and developing the Wales international coastal centre there.

Scotland has embraced the sport with St Andrews University investing in the wider flat boats used to row on the rougher waves and stepping up to become one of Britain’s 11 coastal sculling academies at East Sands Beach. Meanwhile, Glenarm in County Antrim hosted the All-Ireland Coastal Rowing championships this summer for both beach sprint and endurance coastal rowing events. England’s coastal academies include clubs in Tynemouth, Scarborough, Whitby and Lowestoft, alongside many south coast clubs with a strong heritage in the activity. Sandbanks in Dorset was the venue for the first Commonwealth Beach sprint championships in 2018, followed by Namibia in 2022, and Barbados next weekend.

Britain’s Guin Batten, a member of the silver-medal quadruple sculls crew from Sydney 2000 and one of the first British female rowers to stand on a podium, has been masterminding the logistical and political course to get to this point. As chair of the World Rowing coastal commission in her spare time (and deputy chief executive of Volleyball England the rest of the time), Batten describes the two disciplines of coastal and classic rowing as the “yin and yang of the sport”, different yet beautifully complementary, both at their core about brilliant boat skills and athletic prowess and yet each providing such a contrasting spectacle to watch or participate in.

Boat costs and accessibility issues have been cleverly reduced – the wider boats are suitable for beginners and those racing at the highest level, unlike the incredibly narrow hulls that require significant expertise to master in still-water rowing. Countries don’t have to fly their equipment over as a pool of boats is provided, adding another unpredictable factor as participants won’t try out the actual boat they’ll race in until two days before they compete. At that point, they’ll need to study the boats and in particular the fin positions on the hull, which will be key to working out the optimal “buoy-rounding” techniques, all the time knowing they’ll need to judge everything again on the day once they see the size of the waves that Mother Nature chooses to throw at them.

New Zealand’s Emma Twigg, Olympic Champion and five-time Olympian, has reinvigorated her love for being in a boat by taking up the coastal discipline and won at the recent World Championships in Turkey. Twigg told me she had fallen in love with beach sprints because of the “closeness of the racing”, “the beach volleyball vibes”, plus the benefit that you can watch the entire race from start to finish in the mini-stadium area avoiding one of the insurmountable challenges of Olympic still-water rowing where you cannot ever see the whole 2km distance from one vantage point.

Like their classic still-water cousins, coastal rowers will still need to develop a formidable physiology that can both sprint and endure to compete in up to three races in a day. Each race is a lung-busting, all-out effort with an arm-wrenching, shoulder-shuddering effort to make a 180-degree turn round the buoy mid-race. New Zealand’s Olympian Finn Hamill missed the buoy by centimetres to get knocked out at the recent world championships, while the leading favourite from Germany stumbled in the semi-final in the beach sprint allowing Spain’s Anders Martin to come through in the closing seconds to face the reigning American champion, Chris Bak, in the final who held on to retain his title. There’s a mix of existing rowers transitioning to this new discipline and others coming in from coastal clubs, while sports scientists and performance directors work out what future coastal Olympians will look like.

The world’s best coastal rowers will share the Long Beach LA venue alongside open-water swimmers, windsurfers, foil and kitesurfing champions over the fortnight of the Games and show a different side to this otherwise seemingly strait-laced sport. Rowing’s answer to snowcross, BMX and beach volleyball is coming to LA, but if you live near the coast, then it may be coming to a beach near you soon too.