Image description: An image of Oumou Aidara and their participants at the Baltic island of Usedom. 

After a sleepy, quiet three-hour train ride from Berlin, Oumou Aidara, founder of Sport is for Everyone, arrives at the Baltic Sea island of Usedom with her participants for a slow beach hike and a workshop on rest.

Upon arrival, they decide on a bathroom break, followed by coffee, and continue lingering for a while in the little town square near the station; this is right before they spot a baby seal early on their hike and stop to witness this surprise. Aidara describes the sky as immaculate and blue. The air is light and fresh. The sand felt pleasant. She describes: “Everything felt like it was in place,” – it felt as if the group were part of the beach, there at the right moment — given permission to slow down and simply be.

Sport is for Everyone, a Berlin-founded organization newly launched this Spring, aims to create accessible, low-barrier sports and movement experiences for people who have historically been excluded from athletic spaces.

This donation-based event — the organization’s inaugural gathering, held in April — moved at a pace Aidara tailored to the group, a reflection of their openness to continuous learning and adaptation; an acknowledgment that Sport is for Everyone is itself a work in progress, striving to reflect the full breadth of accessibility.

The concept of sport can so often feel distant — for people with disabilities, chronic illness, or anyone priced out of the gear, the gym memberships, the culture. Somewhere along the way, sport stopped feeling like play for many and started feeling like a performance. Aidara’s platform is an attempt to change this: a transdisciplinary space built for different perspectives, pushing for a reality where movement is reclaimed as a birthright. 

Below, we speak with Aidara about Sport is for Everyone, and how movement was never meant to be a privilege. 

CM: The Usedom event centered on slow hiking and rest — concepts that feel almost countercultural in sports spaces. What were you trying to say about movement by designing an experience around slowing down?

OA: I wanted to make a space where we can coexist in nature and enjoy slow soft moments. I wanted to embody come as you are and allow people to not perform. By mentioning it’s slow, which some may see as their biggest fear, because the world says you got to be fast  – I wanted to reclaim this. For me it is essential to be outside and to also have moments where we don’t push for more, for faster, for heavier, for stronger. While it is great to aspire for greatness, we need to remind ourselves to be. And through the creation of these events, I wanted to help people find spaces they can arrive in with no judgements or expectations. Because with communication, it truly is easy to accommodate everyone.

What made you want to create this event?

I love finding new routes, enjoying new adventures and connecting with people. On an individual level, that was it. On a systemic level, it comes back to the idea of creating the future we want now.

What did you experience or see in the world that made you think Sport is for everyone needed to exist?

Quite a lot – on a social, economic level. I’m originally from Senegal, and when I recently traveled there, I realized the privilege I had in Berlin as a femme body that could go out running at night. Where I come from, even running in broad daylight is difficult. The social realities are extremely different. I think making Sport is for Everyone is kind of born from that, from a very personal experience, but also an experience that I see a lot of people have. 

My main sport is running and it just started to feel out of touch. And then there’s also the mental health realities of not being able to keep up with this new challenge that you [feel like you should] be running a marathon every other week. I just started feeling like the sport narrative started becoming more and more suffocating, and inaccessible. 

If you are neurodivergent and you get overstimulated much faster, the kind of sports spaces and clubs you go to should be aware of your needs in order to make it more inviting and inclusive for everyone. The different economical and financial barriers are also shown in sport, like who can afford the time, who has the money.

I’m personally not affected by physical disabilities, only with [issues of] mental health. I can see that there are a lot of barriers for disabled communities. The money barriers of who can afford these adaptive gears is really important. I saw that in the Paralympics just this winter; it’s really expensive to go skiing and snowboarding as someone with a visual impairment. Not everyone can afford these things or have access to them. So, I just keep seeing a lot of barriers, but also a lot of people who create these very expensive [experiences]. 

Sometimes the barriers are not something that you can touch physically – it’s not just money. It’s also barriers that are in the societal aspect and how we interact with one another, which creates these biases and make us not go out and move [our bodies]. 

Do you think this platform could reshape the meaning we’ve attached to sports, and expose wider, systemic issues?

I really hope it can do that, because I think it can be a really nice and easy way to explore society and the world we live in right now. As a child, it was really a time where everyone would sit and watch [soccer] on the TV together. In my case, I was at home and I felt like the whole neighborhood was watching the same football match as us at the same time. You would hear from everyone in the whole universe. Everyone was together. What joy [sports] does by bringing people together.

[My hope is that] more people will feel invited to just move. For example, women in my family, if I think about my grandmother, she’s someone who believes that sport is not for someone like her, because it was never part of the culture or at least because of colonialism. Growing up, sport is something that I’ve seen in my family as “just things that boys do.” But boys are not the only humans who have joints and muscle mass, who need strength to go up and down the stairs, who need to lift their grocery bags. It should be for everyone, that we are able to look after ourselves somehow, and [use movement as a way to] chase a little bit away the gloominess.

It also depends on how we look at sport, because playing sports is a form of movement, and doing all the washing at home or having to do all the reproductive labor is sport as well, but it’s labeled differently.

I think I also sometimes use sport and movement interchangeably because I feel like there’s no other better word. Because, sport has so much competition in it, that I feel like we need a new word! 

What do you hope that Sport is for Everyone achieves?

I hope it can create a lot of awareness around the many inequalities and bring conversations to the world. I would like for these conversations to take various shapes – be it publications, books, or exhibitions, but also just in-person gatherings where you get to be around other people and have these conversations in person as well. So I just hope for the world that we can be more aware of this and try to strive for moving towards a future where there would be lower barriers of entry and that most people can just move their bodies without having to bend backwards to be able to afford or access it.

How do you think that philosophy of rest and slowness could change the experience of sport for people with disabilities or chronic illness?

As someone with a chronic illness, I can’t always be at the same level as I wish I could be on an every day basis. And even though sometimes some spaces don’t say anything bad, they do act in ways that contradict the idea of inclusion. I think creating spaces and taking it step by step, engaging with people and asking for their needs, can create better spaces. I hope to slowly expand, but I found [this Usedom event] to be an easier starting point and with more potential to reach more people and really convince them to join.

When was the last time you did sports and what kind?

I went hiking today. I’m on a little trip in Bavaria and I went on a mountain today and really enjoyed it. It was really nice, it was really steep, we went really high up and it was lovely to have a nice view and feel the sunlight on my face, and see the snow going away. I also went for a run yesterday.

So always leaning more towards sports outside?

Yeah, I try to go [outside] as much as I can. I think for a lot of people it’s not that easy to do — and there’s a version of me that used to not think about it at all; it wouldn’t even cross my mind. So there’s that version of myself that I kind of want to reach.