Inside the world of competitive Beyblade | Canada Voices

The final duellists of the day paused before pulling hard on their Beyblades’ rip cords, firing the spinning tops from their launchers into the stadium a foot below. The hand-held toys – built of interchangeable shiny metal and plastic parts, with spikes along the outer rims – landed abruptly next to each other, but continued to spin undisturbed.

It didn’t take long for them to start circling, inching closer to each other. When they collided, one sent the other rocketing into a corner of the stadium, grinding it to a halt, eliciting uproarious cheers from captivated onlookers.

That was the atmosphere last month at the Waterfront Neighbourhood Centre in downtown Toronto, where local Beyblade enthusiasts competed in a province-wide tournament to crown a champion of the game.

Inspired by traditional Japanese beigoma spinning tops, the Beyblade versions found immediate success on school playgrounds soon after their initial release in 1999. In collaboration with North American distributor and manufacturer Hasbro, their creator Takara Tomy sold millions by the early aughts, quickly landing them a spot as one of the top-selling (no pun intended) toys of all time.

Twenty years later, the tops are experiencing a resurgence in popularity with the release of a new television show Beyblade X, the latest iteration in a long line of Beyblade manga. However, according to the tournament’s contestants, the Beyblade scene has been thriving all the while because of an active online community that is enthusiastic about the competitive aspects of Beyblading, or “blading.”

Scott Williamson, 32, better known by his blader name Kei, first interacted with Beyblades in 2002 as a kid during recess. Captivated by the playful yet competitive nature of the game, Williamson played in his first tournament the following year, during a YTV-hosted Weird on Wheels event at the Canadian National Exhibition.

“After that I still had a desire to play, but there wasn’t official support for tournaments in Canada back then, outside of sporadic events like the CNE event,” Williamson said.

Turning to the internet, he connected with a hobbyist community active on forums like BeyWiki, which he credited with retaining enthusiasts’ interest in between Beyblade generations. BeyWiki would eventually transition into the World Beyblade Organization (WBO), the self-professed “unofficial sanctioning body” for Beyblade, where Williamson is staff. Today the fan-run organization helps organize and advertise dozens of weekly blading meetups in cities around the world for more than 100,000 members.

Having competed in hundreds of tournaments, Williamson founded the Ontario Beyblade Community (OBBC) in January 2024, to more efficiently organize local tournaments. In less than a year, their group now claims 350 members, enough to host monthly events and institute their own ranking system.

Dan Dosch, an OBBC organizer and WBO staffer who helped organize the days’ events, said that while there are definitely Beyblade communities outside of Ontario, none of them have yet to consolidate their own subdivision.

At the tournament last month, organizers called out matchups in quick succession, on a tight schedule if they wanted to wrap-up the grand prix event in time. Contestants compete in special “stadiums” – round, plastic arenas custom designed to contain Beyblades with metal components that can “burst” during duels. The competitors spanned multiple generations, from high schoolers accompanied by older siblings, to adults with full-time careers.

“We have people here who work on airplane engines, are periodontists, are in school or maybe they’re five years old,” said Dosch. He views blading as a great equalizer, an easy way for people of all walks of life to come together and get out of their shell.

His observation tracked with the tournament’s atmosphere. Between matches, contestants laughed and made jokes while awaiting their turn to play. References to Japanese anime such as Naruto, Yu-Gi-Oh and Beyblade were plentiful: Multiple contestants over the course of the day loudly invoked “the power of friendship” prior to stepping up to their stadium, a prominent manga trope wherein a character remembers to rely on his friends to save the day.

For Brian M. Alurralde – blader name coffee4closers – it’s the tight-knit community that keeps him coming back, one in which opponents share advice and parts, especially with young newcomers. A wheelchair user, Alurralde appreciates that the community has taken his accessibility needs seriously: “I have limited reach, so they’ll make accommodations for me like putting the stadium closer to my side. Originally the stadiums were on the floor, but now they have heightened platforms.”

Yet for all the camaraderie in the room, competitive bladers take ranked tournaments seriously with stringent rules. Ahead of OBBC matchups, individual Beyblades are carefully taken apart and inspected to assure no illegal modifications. Williamson records the final matchup of the tournament, carefully reviewing the footage in between runs to guarantee his judgments.

Williamson. whose day job is product lead at a web design and app development company, believes blading could be considered a sport, as players have the opportunity to fine-tune their Beyblade by trying different combinations of parts to find the best version. He admits, though, that the public perception isn’t quite there yet, despite the discipline with which many in the community approach Beyblade. Dosch disagrees, believing you simply cannot outplay an opponent with better parts.

What they can agree on, however, is why people keep coming back to their events.

“Beyblade is primordial. You don’t need to understand much to get it,” Dosch said. “One Beyblade stops spinning, and the other is alive. You feel good when your Beyblade knocks the other out of the stadium, or starts running circles around the corpse.”