Some 14,000 athletes and officials from about 170 countries will participate in the 28th Summer Universiade in Gwangju, July 3-14.
They will compete for 272 gold medals at stake in 21 sports ― 13 compulsory and eight optional.
The compulsory sports are athletics, artistic gymnastics, baseball, basketball, fencing, football, judo, rhythmic gymnastics, swimming, table tennis, tennis, volleyball and water polo. The organizers chose archery, badminton, baseball, golf, handball, rowing, shooting and taekwondo as optional disciplines.
No demonstration sports will be staged in Gwangju.
“We have fixed the number of sports at 21 because it was the most feasible number of sports for us to host the event,” said an official of Gwangju 2015 Universiade Organization Committee. “We seek to hold a low-cost and high-efficiency Universiade.”
The 2011 Shenzhen and 2013 Kazan Universiades held 24 and 27 sports, respectively.
Each Universiade event must hold 13 compulsory sport disciplines under the International University Sports Federation (FISU) rule. The host nation can choose optional sports from the list of the World University Championships.
Taekwondo will join compulsory the list of sports in 2017, and archery will follow suit in 2019. Optional sports vary from one Summer Universiade to another.
To reduce the scale of the Universiade and find future candidate cities more easily, the FISU prefers up to three optional sports.
Athletics and swimming are big sports with 50 and 42 gold medals up for grabs, respectively, at 2015 Gwangju Universiade. Shooting is third with 34. Badminton is last with six gold medals at stake.
Organizers will award a total of 2,648 medals at the event. The daily number of gold medals at stake peaks at 41 on July 7, followed by 35 on July 9 and 34 on both July 10 and 12. The last gold medal of the 2015 Universiade will come in water polo on July 14.
Football and water polo matches will kick off a day before the opening ceremony.
Undergraduates, graduate students aged 17 to 28 and those who graduated from universities up to a year before the event are eligible to compete in the Universiade.
Most athletes competing in Gwangju are expected to participate in the Rio Olympic Games two years later. Forty-eight percent of medalists at the 2012 London Olympics were former Universiade or World University Championships medalists.
Either China or Russia has taken the first place in the medal count since 2001. China won more golds than Russia in 2001, 2003, 2007 and 2011. Russia came ahead of China in 2005, 2009 and 2013.
By Yeo Jun-suk (jasonyeo@heraldcorp.com)