Greater visibility for IRV activities

Community action, World Championships, decisions, fruitful discussions, exchange of opinions, and a bunch of fresh ideas. This was the 2026 IRV Annual Meeting in Freiburg, Germany.

The IRV Annual Meeting was held on the first weekend in October, and a considerable amount of time was devoted to a detailed review of the 2026 World Championships in Göttingen at the beginning of July. As ever, the objective was to learn from experience and identify key takeaways for future World Championships. In the next two years we will be collaborating with the organisers of the upcoming IRV Team World Championships in Austria (2027) and the next IRV Individual World Championships in the US (2028). We also want to incentivise new countries/clubs to bid for hosting future championships.

Guests and new recruits

At this year’s IRV meeting, we were happy to welcome three guest participants from the former and the current Athletes’ Commission (AC), as well as two new recruits to the official IRV Team. The two former AC members (Malena Kernacs and Simon Rufener) are involved in work on the new IRV Code of Points, while current AC member Gabriël Lomans was a new acquaintance for the more established IRV Team. New recruits to the IRV, attending their first annual meeting, were Simone Schot (Netherlands) and Ingrid Vukusic (Austria). We are very happy to welcome Simone as our new social media manager and Ingrid as a member of our media team with particular responsibility for the IRV newsletter, website editing and potential podcasts.

Inputs from both our guests and new recruits during the course of the weekend pointed towards the need for more transparency about IRV work and activities, and we are convinced that the strengthening of our team in the area of media and communication will be more than visible in the coming months. Please check us out on social media and register for our newsletter.

Open for volunteers

Since the IRV is a very small federation and dependent on volunteers, we are always open to offers of help to grow our beautiful sport. We are an international team of enthusiasts with more ideas and potential tasks than we have people to manage them. If you would like to join in the fun, the best kind of help you can offer is to tell us what skills you have and how you think you could use them – all proposals are welcome. Volunteer ambassadors, event managers, content creators, etc. are just some of the suggestions that came up during our meeting last weekend.

IRV Academy

The meeting delegates also talked about the IRV academy and how to make existing learning materials more accessible to the community as a whole. Be prepared to see the release of more materials in the future.

We all left Freiburg with a high degree of motivation, a personal work package, and a big smile. See you all in May 2027 in Salzburg.