The Santiago 2027 organising committee, meeting Monday at National Stadium Park, confirmed the full 22-sport program for the World Summer Games — the first time the movement’s flagship event will be held south of the equator and the first time in Latin America in its 57-year history.
The slate keeps the 19 sports that ran in Berlin 2023 and adds three: fútbol 5-a-side (a nod to South American football culture), bocce (already a Special Olympics staple in Italy and Argentina), and open-water swimming, which will run at a coastal venue in Algarrobo, two hours west of the capital.
“We wanted the program to feel like Chile, not like a copy of a previous Games,” said Patricio Mardones, the committee’s sport director, at the press event. “Open-water swimming is part of how our country lives with the Pacific. Fútbol is how a million kids find a team in the first place.”
The 22 sports will run across 14 venues between 16–24 October 2027, drawing an expected 6,000 athletes from more than 170 nations. The opening ceremony will be staged at the renovated Estadio Nacional Julio Martínez Prádanos, which last hosted a continental athletics championship in 2018.
The committee also released its first wave of unified-sports pairings — a competition format that pits mixed-ability teams against one another, and which has driven much of the growth in domestic Special Olympics leagues over the past decade. Unified basketball, unified fútbol, and unified bowling will all run on full medal brackets in Santiago.
Athlete entry quotas will be finalised by national programs through the end of 2026. The committee said it will publish venue maps, ticket information, and a public volunteer call in early 2027.