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Team Ollo made it to the quarterfinals of World Chase Tag’s 2020 tournament in Atlanta, where Fernando Arce (top center) served as captain. (Photo courtesy of Fernando Arce Instagram)
PHOENIX – From start to finish, it takes 4.3 seconds.
The chaser in yellow and black sets his sights on the man in gray. He gets a running start from the edge of the “quad,” eyes on his cornered prey. The pursuer hurdles the Front Line, hops onto the base of the Mountain, then lunges onto an elevated platform to the right, extending his arm at full stretch through the side of the Loading Bay to catch his fleeing foe.
Tag, you’re it.
A competitive ruleset for the childhood game of tag, World Chase Tag features matches consisting of 16 chases in a 40-foot by 40-foot quad strewn with creatively named obstacles, in which a member of one team earns a point by evading the other team’s tagger for 20 seconds. Teams cycle through six athletes.
The tagger here, in Team Ollo’s playoff win against No Cap at World Chase Tag USA 2020, was Fernando Arce, a Phoenix-based parkour athlete. Nicknamed the Velociraptor, Arce captioned the lightning-fast play on his Instagram “return of the raptor.”
As team captain, Arce led OLLO to a berth in the quarterfinals of the inaugural tournament in Atlanta in October, where it lost to the ultimate champions, Colorado-based Apex.
“It was so much fun, and so needed because everyone was locked up in pandemic times, so we’re all, like, in our homes, not able to train outside or go to a gym because gyms are shut down,” Arce said. “And so, when we had this opportunity to travel, and meet up with a whole bunch of other athletes from around the U.S., it was such a fun time.”
The 2020 tournament was the first major U.S. event for World Chase Tag. Arce completed five of six tags in an average time of 10 seconds, but did not record an evasion in four attempts. For the upcoming August 2021 tournament in Akron, Ohio, where organizers are discussing welcoming an audience, Arce will take his talents to the broadcast booth.
“It’s just another expression of who I am,” he said, “expressing out and explaining our sport to people who are unknowledgeable about it and want to know more about it.”
The 2021 competition marks another key step in the rapid growth of a game that began with Christian Devaux and his son in their yard in England in 2011, chasing each other through tables, benches and “general garden rubbish.” The fledgling sport grew into a group on the online organizing service Meetup in Hyde Park, London, before hosting its first official event in 2016. Then came the meteoric rise.
“As soon as we did that first event, we put it out online,” Devaux said. “People started to watch, and once it got picked up on a couple of channels, like LADbible, Unilad, Bleacher Report, all these big Facebook and Instagram channels would ask for footage.”
World Chase Tag now has 896,000 YouTube subscribers and 160,000 Instagram followers. Devaux, who founded the competition with his brother Damien, said the sport’s mass appeal comes from its universality. As a beloved childhood game, he said, it transcends the “cultural limitations” of traditional sports.
“To chase and be chased is one of the most natural states of our mind,” he said. “We’re here on the planet. Humans have been successful because of our ability to hunt and to avoid being hunted.”
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