Inside the Business of the World’s Fastest Growing Sport | Victor Cui | Tank Talks Asia

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Victor: Pickleball is a very different space in the world of sports in that it's massively inclusive. It doesn't matter about your race, age, socio economic status or even, you know, it's intergenerational play. If you're 75 years old or you're seven years old, it's an opportunity to play together. So it makes it a really unique sport in that way. And because of that, I love that inclusivity around it.

Manisha: Pickleball. You either love it or hate it. Some Singapore residents are up in arms about the pock, pock, pock sound that's been ruining their evenings. Their gripes have even had some courts shut down, but that hasn't stopped our guest. He isn't just a fan of the sport, he's the founding partner of Epic World Championship and he's helping bring the world's first amateur pickleball tournament to Singapore with F1-style flair.

With a long history in the business of sports Victor Cui is co-founder of the One Championship mixed martial arts powerhouse that's now valued at over a billion dollars. He also serves on the Canadian Olympic Committee and used to be the CEO of Canada's Edmonton Elks.

Hello, and thanks for joining us on Tank Talks Asia. I'm Manisha Tank, from me and the rest of the AsiaWorks team, a warm welcome to you. On this episode, we're joined by Global Sports Business Executive, Victor Cui. Victor, welcome to the show. It’s really nice to see you.

Victor: It is a pleasure to be here.

Manisha: I think Singapore's quite close to your heart, isn't it?

Victor: Singapore's home. You know, my kids were born here. My wife is from here. I got married here. My son's coming back from national service in a few years, so it's an important part of our family.

Manisha: But rest of the time you are based in Canada, right?

Victor: That's right, yeah. I've been based in Canada. I was born in Canada, so we went back when COVID hit and we've been there since then.

Manisha: I'm just gonna go straight in. You and a group of people are behind this tournament that's gonna happen in Singapore. So this grabbed headlines recently and when we saw this story, we thought we've gotta have Victor on the show. We've gotta talk to him about this. It is the EPIC World Championship. It is an amateur pickleball tournament. Am I reading that right?

Victor: That's right, that's right.

Manisha: Okay.

Victor: It's the pinnacle of amateur competition in the world. It brings players from all around the world, and you qualify in a couple different ways. One, if you're a top ranked amateur player in your country, you would've received an invite from the ranking system or your national federation.

The second way is if you win a local tournament, you get a free entry into the world championship. And the third way is with sponsor exemption, like as the host nation in Singapore, our partners and sponsors are offering to Singaporeans a discounted rate, and they get to play in the world championship because they're, you know, from the host nation country.

So there's a bunch of direct exemptions that you can get into the event as well.

Manisha: I'm really curious, how did this idea come about? Why did you decide on Singapore? You've told me off air that it wasn't just you. There's a bunch of people involved, but what was the story that went into it?

Victor: I always love that question of the origin story because it lets you, as the entrepreneur, get to go back into your mind of what you did and what inspired you. But I think the summary of it is pickleball is a very different space in the world of sports, in that it's massively inclusive.

It doesn't matter about your race, age, socio economic status or even, you know, it's intergenerational play. If you're 75 years old or you're seven years old, it's an opportunity to play together. So it makes it a really unique sport in that way. And because of that, I love that inclusivity around it.

Why we decided to start this and where did the origin of it come from? There's a lot of investment and rapid growth in the sport in North America, particularly on the pro side. Now, the mass participation side of it is also growing, but America is usually the center for a lot of sports growth.

Right. But Asia was lagging by maybe a couple of years in that trend as it started to get popular. And we were planning with some friends and sitting around and talking about sports and opportunities.

Manisha: As you do.

Victor: As you do. Exactly. And we kind of identified this gap that lined up with our values and what we wanted to do and said, how can we bring the world together around sport in an affordable way? In a fun way, in a friendly way and get other people excited about it. And that was in a mass participation event around pickleball, amateur players.

Manisha: And you've been in sport for a very long time. For those in our audience who don't know, maybe you could just remind everyone of some of the big ventures you've been involved in.

Victor: Well, I've now been in the sports industry probably coming on to 30 years now, and this will be the seventh sport property that I would've created or launched in Asia.

I've just been really lucky in my life. You know, God gave me the desire to play sports, but no ability. So I had to, I've always been a little bit upset with them, like, why fill me with so much love for it, but not the talent?

t a whole bunch of things. In: 2010

Manisha: Yes. Which people in this region know really, really well.

Victor: Oh, thank you. That was some brilliant people that we got a chance to work with. And that organization raised money from investors all around the world, including here in Singapore, from Temasek.

So that was in: 2010

Manisha: So you've told us a little bit about how the tournament's gonna be set up, who can get involved. One of the things I thought was really interesting was the prize money and the fact that you said the more people sign up to play, then the higher the prize money will be. I'm not familiar with this kind of thing. Is this normal?

Victor: No, no one's ever done it before. We start off with a guaranteed 50,000, which is already bigger than any amateur thing. And then the whole idea was that if you play and you win, you know, maybe you're in the quarterfinals or semi-finals, okay so you win a thousand dollars or 500 bucks. That's like a free holiday.

That was kind of our mindset of how do you make it a sport holiday experience with the prize purse. And then we kind of took an element from poker. In poker, when you play in a tournament, the prize purse escalates with each new person playing.

Manisha: Yeah, of course.

Victor: And that sort of builds a new excitement and lets more people come and register. So that's what we wanted to do. It will take some time for people to understand that the more people that enter, the bigger the pot grows, and then opportunity for it. But it's, right now it's going well. We’ll probably end up with a prize purse in year one of $75,000, somewhere around there.

Manisha: Okay. Well, I look forward to seeing how that pans out. I got a sense when I was looking at what you're trying to achieve here, that you wanna have a little bit of F1 style flare. How are you gonna pull that off?

Victor: Who doesn't wanna have a little bit of F1 style flare. Right.

Manisha: That's a lot of investment though.

Victor: Of course. Of course. We're very lucky to be supported by the Singapore Tourism Board. I mean, it's a privilege to have them as a partner because we're a brand new event and a brand new organization, but there is not a lot of properties that have this value proposition that we have, that can really attract people to come for multiple days, like F1.

But the philosophy of the event is not really about competition. It's about bringing the world together to have a great time around music, food, entertainment, socialization and competitive and fun pickleball. When people come on site, we're not charging tickets, anybody can come. There'll be the pickleball courts, food trucks and entertainment stage, and the seating around the main stage, the main courts, which we call the epicenter, is meant to be free flowing. It's sort of like patio style, laid back, wicker furniture so that you could come, sit down for a few minutes, get out of the sun.

Manisha: It sounds very tropical.

Victor: Yeah, right. It's like, imagine yourself with your friends on the weekend are like, well let's go see what we should do with the family.

Bring the dog, bring the family, and bring the kids and enjoy a little bit of competition.

Manisha: Coming up. Why bring pickleball to Singapore?

Okay. You know, the irony of course is pickleball has been getting a lot of headlines in Singapore. But not the best headlines. Many residents in Singapore have complained about people playing pickleball, to the extent that the government has even had to put restrictions on when you can play.And it's the sound, I know exactly the sound they're talking about.

Victor: Yeah.

Manisha: I mean, come on, the irony's not lost on you, that you're hosting it in Singapore where there has been so much outcry.

Victor: Yeah, I think if you do anything at scale and it grows, there's always other people that are gonna have some concerns about it, and it's good to put guardrails around anything that's growing.

It's good for the sport, it's good for fans and the community and all that kind of stuff. So I don't think that there's an issue with trying to understand the growth of the sport and how you can control it so that it's good for the community, but noise in any large gathering is always an issue.

I remember when we were working on the X Games. And the complaint was, we can't have kids riding around on skateboards on the sidewalk. It will destroy the sidewalks. Well that sounds ludicrous, but that was what we thought 20 years ago.

So I think new sports take a little bit of time to transition into the public sentiment, but ultimately what do we want for society, in my opinion is. I think we want opportunities for people to spend more time together, and pickleball is one of those social activities that allows that, because we can play for 15 minutes, sit down, drink, eat a little bit of food, chitchat and then go back and play again.

Manisha: Yeah.

Victor: There's just not a lot of sports that allow you to do that. With golf, you're with the same four people for four hours. Tennis, if you're playing well, you shouldn't be able to talk.

Manisha: But I do want to just continue with that thread a little bit because it does make quite a bit of noise. So did that have to play into your planning a little bit?

Victor: Absolutely. So the event has to finish by 10pm, which is great. It actually works out really well for us. We have 25 courts. We've had to limit it this year to a maximum of 1,300 players. This is gonna quickly grow to 5,000, 10,000, 20,000. But this year we're limiting and just to get it right.

Over one weekend and 25 courts, that's kind of the theoretical max that you can get in of players. So we start really early 'cause of Singapore heat, take a break midday from 12 to 2:30, 3 o'clock, and then start again and finish before 10.

Manisha: That is a lot of pickleball, but good luck with it.

So I wanna talk more widely about the business of sport, the appeal of sport to different demographics and in different countries. Why paddle might not thrive, but pickleball would?

Victor: I think if you want to break that down, we have to separate the popularity of participation of a sport, from the business math and the analysis from a logical perspective as an entrepreneur. So I would say in Asia specifically, if we look at the participation rates, is populations need to access a sport that is readily accessible, affordable, easy to get to, low barrier to entry. Right.

And that's what really drives the masses because we've got so much ability to scale in Asia. 'Cause to throw an event for a thousand people where I live in Edmonton in Canada is very, very difficult. A thousand people is a lot of people. In Asia, a thousand people is a wedding. Right. So our scale of what we're used to because of the number of people we have is very, very different.

So it quickly grows when there's accessibility. So I think the barriers to entry as a sport for pickleball are very, very low for participation. That leads to high growth. From the business side of it, the proposition is a little bit different because there's existing infrastructure, as in mostly tennis or badminton, that gets converted into pickleball courts, and the math works very well.

The math is very straightforward from a tennis court, you put four pickleball courts on it. Now you four x your usage per hour and you four x your revenue.

Manisha: Yeah.

Victor: And badminton, you two exit let's say. So that math doesn't work for paddle. Paddle, you have to create a whole new facility and a whole new infrastructure, but it serves maybe a different demographic that has largely more disposable income, let's say, because they're into it, so maybe the value equation kind of works out a little bit. It's hard to say. I think there's enough room for all the sports. Everybody's gotta find their own.

Manisha: In a moment, why the Olympics still matter.

Victor, am I right in thinking you are on the Olympic Committee, Canada's Olympic Committee?

Victor: I am. I am.

Manisha: Why is it that Asia plays certain sports? Is it to do with the demographics or the availability of space, or what is behind this correlation between certain sports and Asian players?

Victor: I guess, I'm not backed by any data, I couldn't quote you anyone. But I'd say, let me first start by giving an example in a different way. In the Paralympics, the number one most dominant country by, I think 300% in medal tallies or maybe more, is China.

Manisha: Hmm.

Victor: They win more medals than anybody else. Why? It's not that Chinese are, whatever the physical attributes are needed to succeed in sports or anything else like that. But the government decided that we want to be able to showcase these athletes as mentors in our society, of what you can achieve and resilience and grit and all the great stories that come with with those athletes, with Paralympians.

And so they succeeded. The government put funding into it and there's a whole process and the development, et cetera, et cetera. So I think the world does change when the government makes a priority in funding.

Manisha: Yeah.

Victor: Financial resources and accessibility is an important part for, particularly if it's an expensive sport. In general, in my opinion, having lived in Asia and born in North America, and bringing my kids back and forth between the two.

Manisha: Yeah, you have that comparison.

Victor: Yeah. The valuation of the importance of sports in youth is different in North America than it is in Asia. So in North America it is not unusual to spend 15 or $20,000 a year per kid on sports.

Manisha: True. Yeah.

Victor: Like that is, it's common. You would do it in volleyball, basketball, tennis, swimming, et cetera, et cetera. In Asia, it's unlikely, unless that athlete has a clear path to some sort of other level. Right. And maybe that's, we have a generation of parents that didn't see the value in sport and doesn't get recognized into the workforce.

Manisha: I wondered about that. In Asia, there is not enough emphasis put on kids doing sport.

Victor: Right.

Manisha: And that's a massive generalization, but would you agree?

Victor: I agree with all the benefits of sports, of resilience, losing, you know, winning, losing, teamwork, all that kind of stuff. But I think we're heading into a generation of parents that view the world differently.

I had a great life. I didn't want for, my parents weren't rich, but I didn't suffer, you know? And, but they were also not as involved in my life as I am with my kids. Like there were days that they had no idea where I was. I was just on my bike riding out the whole time. Right. It was a different period. They're busy putting food on the table. You know, they were working 18 hour days and that's what needed to happen to give me the opportunities that I had.

But today, I think that there's a little bit more of an emphasis and people see that this is part of being a global citizen and if we wanna do our parenting job right, to build future global citizens sports is one of those pillars that if you can get, I wouldn’t say just sports, some other team-based extracurricular activity, you know, could be sports, could be anything else but.

Manisha: A question about the Olympics more specifically. Why is the Olympics still so important?

Victor: Why?

Manisha: Is it still important?

Victor: As a business model, and I always you know, go back to my entrepreneur in me.

Manisha: Okay.

Victor: It is evolving and it's had to change, because we don't run the world like that where we could spend billions of dollars on sports and not have a clear understanding of the legacies of what's left. I don't think society and voters and government see the world like that anymore.

So that has gotta change and it is slowly changing. You know, the Vancouver Winter Olympics was the first Winter Olympics to be profitable. And they had a very specific and experts in there and a strategic plan, to leave legacies for Canada.

Manisha: What was it that made it profitable?

Victor: They brought in a really bespoke approach to the partners. So traditionally, Olympics can be quite rigid and where you fall in and where, are you a top level sponsor, or are you a domestic or a national sponsor and partner?

But to start customizing for each one and really understanding what do you want out of this as a business? Not just gimme your sponsorship dollars and put your logo and disappear, which is what we used to do. We used to pay, ask Coca-Cola just to pay to have their logo on the wall. And maybe a little bit of activation.

But now it's like, I don't really care if my logo's on the wall because I have a gigantic online reach on my social media anyway. So all the businesses have had to evolve to understand what works in a good, in a healthy partnership.

But the Olympics I think is still relevant because, I think coming out of COVID more and more we realized that we do need to get together and people like getting together and sport is a gathering point for that.

And again, you know, to take it back to pickleball, like that's what I'm seeing. People are enjoying that element of the socializing aspect of it and, back to Asia, is that 20 years ago when you socialized after work, what did you do? You went to a bar. And you drank and you went to KTV and then you went to Clark Quay.

Manisha: Maybe you did.

Victor: Yeah, I did. I'm talking about others. Those other people, not me of course, but you know, others went to Clark Quay and partied till three o'clock in the morning, then you went to work. Right. But now there's not a lot of drinking. We have a generation of people in the workforce that don't see getting drunk as political capital or social capital.

Manisha: Yeah, it's been a big drop off.

Victor: Right? And what do they see? They see, let me demonstrate I have a good and healthy balance of work and life, and health and fitness. Watch me running, watch me doing exercise and look how well balanced, and I have a happy mental state.

So things have changed. So people are looking for other activities like that and pickleball fits and hits all these check marks for people to be able to do that.

Manisha: As someone who is in the business world of sport, I suppose the technology has been really beneficial.

Victor: Yeah. You know what's interesting there, is that if you look at all the technology, whether it's the Oura ring or, you know, monitoring devices and the technology is all relatively the same. The apps is where, how it presents you as a user interface and makes a difference.

So we're finding these tools, whether it's AI or other apps that are have the ability to give me the information that I want in the way that I want it. And that spans right across the board to, from health and fitness to Duolingo and learning a language, right? It delivers language lessons that are catered specifically to you. We had never had that ability before.

Manisha: Coming up. Is sports betting ruining the game?

Recently, there have been some interesting cases in the US of young players, football players, that have been targeted by criminal gangs match fixing. Was it a worry, for example, let's take One Championship, for example. Did it ever worry you that, how do you protect them? How do you protect the system from this kind of interference?

Victor: When you have sport betting, the integrity of the sport is always an ongoing challenge, right? Because from any sport that has a betting opportunity, always poses a risk. I think you can't forever block it. You only have to try and put the right rules in place to keep integrity of the sport at the highest level, from the athletes to the officials.

In One Championship, you know, or in actually in any combat sports, whether it’s boxing to MMA, it's always been an issue, right? You watch any movie and they talk about boxing being fixed or things like that.

Rules do come into play. And I think we're, technology is also changing how the world of sport betting is, because there are so many iterations of the types of bet that you can make in real time.

If we go back just 15 years ago, you could only really bet on win or lose or like a very specific outcome at the end of it. But now within the entire game, as allows you to make customized bets of whatever you think, you know, you could invent a bet if you wanted. Will the referee fall down on their left knee in the second period?

Manisha: Yeah.

Victor: You could do that. And if somebody wants to take up the bet, then it's a bet. Right. So I think that level of the sport too is also really gonna change as more of these opportunities and, it's country by country, or in some cases like in Canada, it's province by province, it's different regulated.

So I think it's gonna take some time, but people way smarter than me are working on it, so.

Manisha: Alright. Speaking of working on things, what else are you working on? I'm sure that you always have a few irons in the fire. What else has been going on?

Victor: I've been very lucky to work with some amazing people and particularly with EPIC. You know, there's the team from Wolfpack that's a shareholder and they run one of the largest festivals in Singapore, GastroBeats, which is a food and music. So they get to bring that element into EPIC and we hired a team and it's a fantastic team that's with EPIC and it's really, really different to have a sport that so many brands and sponsors wanna be a part of. Whereas in combat sports, it was a little bit of a different battle.

I continue to do some work with two-time F1 Champion, Mika Häkkine on different projects that we've done over the last few years. I was also recently working with Olympian Shaun White on his new snow league that he created, a halfpipe competition. It's the best snowboarding and freestyle skiing competition.

Manisha: Sounds extraordinary.

Victor: It's fantastic. They had their first event in Aspen and in December it was in China. So I helped them set up their business in China and their media rights deals and partnerships. But I love skiing. I love winter sports, so it gets, lets me be around that.

And so it's just, I've been lucky in life now to keep on doing projects that I enjoy and work with people that I can bring value to.

Manisha: Fantastic. Well look, good luck for the upcoming tournament and good luck with all of these other projects as well.

Victor: Thank you.

Manisha: And I hope that you will come back and join us on the show another time.

Victor: Absolutely, I appreciate the privilege. Thank you.

Manisha: Thanks again.

So hopefully now you know your pickleball from your paddle. That's it for this episode. We really appreciate you listening all the way through. Don't forget to check out our show notes where you'll find relevant links to everything we've mentioned, in case there's anything you'd like to follow up on, and please do subscribe and follow Tank Talks Asia. That way you'll never miss an episode.

I'm Manisha Tank, from me and the team at AsiaWorks, thanks again for your time. Tank Talks Asia is an AsiaWorks production, and the views and opinions shared by our guests are their own.