Dear community,

It is with the deepest regret that we inform you that there will be no WCA World Championship this year.

This week, the core team and the WCA Board came to the inevitable conclusion that we must cancel the championship. We are very sorry that we have to disappoint everyone who was looking forward to this event.

For a long time we were confident that the (postponed) championship in Almere could go ahead. However, the recent developments show us that this is no longer a realistic scenario.

One of the goals of the WCA World Championships is to have participants from as many countries as possible. Traditionally many of these participants travel a long distance, often with their families, to attend the event. Therefore we think that we should give the participants maximum confidence that the competition will take place, once they have registered and booked their trips.

Unfortunately now with less than five months before the planned dates of the World Championship we cannot give that confidence. We have to deal with ongoing uncertainty surrounding government regulations for major events in The Netherlands. Regulations are changing by the week and measures that have been relieved are again taken once the number of new positive tests is increasing. Usually the first measure to be taken is to cancel events with many attendants and such a measure is the last to be relieved again.

In addition to that, international travelling is still very limited and highly regulated. Even people who are fully vaccinated often need to be tested. Many countries have negative travel advice or require quarantaine when travelling. We know from several top cubers that they were not going to attend the World Championship because of these limitations. We have no control over these measures and no exceptions will be made for our World Championship.

Even if in December everything is looking better, there will still be a real risk that we have to cancel the competition if the number of new positive tests is increasing or if some countries give negative travel advice for The Netherlands. The conditions for the competition are also quite uncertain: we may be required to do daily testing for competitors and visitors. We have to deal with the risk of competitors and/or staff getting infected during the championship and not being able to participate or do their staff duties.

This definitively puts an end to our current plans for a large championship in The Netherlands. Next year there will be the continental championships in Copenhagen, Melbourne, Brasilia, Cape Town, Semey and Toronto. The next World Championship will be in Seoul, Korea. We wish the organizing teams the best of luck.

We wanted nothing more than to organize the best World Championship ever and give you a fantastic experience. As the organizing team, we are of course very disappointed. But it is what it is, unfortunately. We thank everyone who contributed to this championship. Together we put an enormous amount of effort into this. Many thanks, it was a pleasure to work with you.