Blind tennis secures a permanent place within IBSA ahead of the World Championships in Vilnius
The International Blind Sports Federation (IBSA) has established a permanent Blind Tennis Committee, giving tennis for blind and visually impaired players a lasting place within the governance system of one of the key international organizations for sports for people with visual impairments. The decision was approved by the IBSA Executive Board, and the federation announced it on 9 August 2026, just two weeks before the start of the World Championships in Vilnius. According to IBSA, the new committee is intended not merely as an administrative structure, but as an institutional framework through which competitions, classification, anti-doping, education, sports development, equipment standardization, athlete safeguarding and communication should gradually be connected. This brings to an end a period of several years in which the international development of the discipline was primarily led by the International Blind Tennis Association (IBTA), and begins a phase of direct integration into the broader IBSA system. For a sport that, in just over four decades, has grown from a Japanese innovation into an international discipline present in more than 30 countries, this represents one of the most important organizational changes to date.
From cooperation to fuller integration
According to IBSA's official statement, blind tennis originated in Japan in 1984 thanks to the work of Takei Miyoshi, who developed a way of playing tennis adapted for people with visual impairments. Over the following decades, the sport developed its own rules, classification system and international competitions, while the IBTA played a central role in its expansion. IBSA states that major international championships have been held since 2017, while blind tennis became part of the IBSA World Games programme for the first time in Birmingham in 2023. In July 2025, IBSA announced that the IBTA had 32 national members, compared with 17 countries involved at the time of the 2023 Games, when more than 70 visually impaired tennis players were invited to the tournament. These figures demonstrate how rapidly the sport's international base expanded before the decision to integrate it more formally into the IBSA system.
Institutional rapprochement accelerated on 7 September 2025 in Casablanca, where IBSA and IBTA signed a memorandum of understanding during the IBSA New Vision for Africa conference. According to IBSA, the purpose of the agreement was to formalize cooperation and pave the way for the inclusion of blind tennis in the family of sports under the federation's umbrella. A month later, another important step followed: the International Tennis Federation (ITF) and IBTA signed a memorandum of understanding defining cooperation in global development, governance, classification and standardization of adapted equipment. At the time, the ITF stated that it wanted to better understand the structure of blind tennis, its regulations and long-term development needs, while the IBTA was expected to gain access to the ITF's experience in the governance and development of other forms of tennis for people with disabilities. The agreement also envisaged work on expanding participation and aligning classification rules with relevant international standards.
Development then moved onto one of the world's biggest tennis stages. On 31 January and 1 February 2026, the Australian Open included the Blind and Low Vision Showdown in its official programme, which the organizer described as the first event of its kind within the programme of a Grand Slam tournament. Sixteen players took part, divided between Team Australia and Team World, with representatives from all four classification groups, B1, B2, B3 and B4. The event did not change the sport's governance status, but it gave it visibility within the environment of elite professional tennis and showed that the adapted discipline could be presented to audiences alongside other tennis formats. Several months later, IBSA took the institutional step intended to provide such international growth with an appropriate governance structure.
IBTA ceases to exist as a separate legal structure, while knowledge is transferred into the new system
IBSA states that its Executive Board formally launched the process of integrating blind tennis on 30 March 2026. After that, the IBSA administration and IBTA leadership worked on organizational, governance and operational aspects of the transition. In the meantime, the IBTA was dissolved as an independent legal entity, which, according to the federation, created the conditions for moving from a partnership relationship to a permanent structure within IBSA. The latest decision established the IBSA Blind Tennis Committee as an official permanent committee of the federation, while the IBSA Chief Executive Officer was authorized to launch the process for nominating and appointing the chair of the new body and to coordinate the continued integration into the organization's governance, regulatory and operational systems.
For athletes and national organizations, the most important question will be what this change will look like in practice. IBSA has announced that the new framework should cover sports and competition governance, classification, anti-doping, education and development, equipment standardization and certification, athlete safeguarding and communication. This opens up the possibility of more consistent rules and procedures between countries, as well as stronger links with IBSA's network of national members. At the same time, the federation emphasized that it wants to preserve the knowledge, experience and international contacts that the blind tennis community built through the IBTA, rather than allowing the transition to mean a break with the previous structure. Cooperation with the ITF also remains important because that organization is the global governing body for tennis and has experience in developing international competition systems.
How blind tennis is played
Blind tennis retains the basic concept of tennis, but uses adaptations that allow players to orient themselves without relying on standard visual contact with the ball and the lines. According to materials from the Australian Open and the organizers of the World Championships in Vilnius, a sound ball is used so that players can track its movement by hearing, while the court lines are adapted so they can be felt by touch or underfoot. The rules permit a different number of bounces depending on the classification category. In the B1 category, in which players wear blindfolds to equalize conditions, up to three bounces are allowed; B2 also allows up to three, B3 up to two, and B4 one bounce. These rules simultaneously preserve the structure of a tennis point and adapt the reaction time required to different levels of functional vision.
The B1, B2, B3 and B4 categories will also form the basis of competition at the World Championships in Vilnius. Organizers state that world championship titles will be awarded in precisely these four groups, defined according to level of vision. In practice, this means classification is not a secondary administrative formality, but one of the foundations of the sporting integrity of competition. That is why the fact that the new IBSA committee is taking responsibility for linking the sport with the international classification system is particularly important. A standardized classification framework allows athletes from different countries to compete according to comparable criteria, which is essential for credible international rankings and competitions.
Vilnius will be the first major test of the new institutional phase
The first major global competition following the decision to establish a permanent committee will take place from 23 to 29 August 2026 at the SEB Arena in Vilnius. According to the organizers' official website, Lithuania will host the Blind Tennis World Championships for the first time, with more than 120 athletes and delegation members from more than 20 countries across six continents expected to attend. Among the announced countries are Japan, the United Kingdom, Poland, Italy, Argentina, Australia, India, the United States, Germany and Lithuania. Organizers describe the event as the world's largest gathering of blind tennis and as one of the more significant international adaptive sports competitions in Lithuania during 2026. The competition will therefore, very soon after IBSA's decision, show what the international community that the new committee is expected to unite and develop over the long term looks like.
The championship is hosted by Blind Sport LT in cooperation with the City of Vilnius, Go Vilnius, the Lithuanian Tennis Union and international partners. The championship's official website particularly highlights the participation of home player Karolis Verbliugevičius, while organizers expect leading competitors from a number of countries with already developed blind tennis programmes. For Lithuania, the championship is also confirmation of the rapid development of a relatively young domestic scene. According to information published by the organizers ahead of the tournament, blind tennis has been developed more systematically in the country only over the past few years, and domestic athletes have already achieved international results. Nevertheless, the significance of Vilnius goes beyond the local context because athletes and delegations from different parts of the world will meet in one place at a moment when the international architecture of the sport itself is changing.
The timing of the championship is also important because of the transition period. The decision on the permanent committee was made less than three weeks before the start of the event, so it cannot be expected that all areas of integration will be completed before the first serve in Vilnius. IBSA described the new process as the gradual connection of blind tennis with the federation's existing systems, which points to development over a longer period. The World Championships will therefore primarily be the competitive pinnacle of an already established international community, but at the same time a symbolic starting point for a new institutional phase. The success of that transition will be measured less by the formal name of the committee and more by whether it brings athletes and organizers a more stable calendar, clear rules, transparent classification and broader access to competitions.
The road to the 2027 IBSA World Games
Blind tennis already has experience of appearing at a major IBSA multisport event. At the 2023 World Games in Birmingham, the discipline was included among the sports at the Games for the first time, and in its 2025 announcement of the partnership with the IBTA, IBSA explicitly linked their cooperation with the objective of blind tennis participating at the 2027 World Games. IBSA President Ilgar Rahimov said at the time that formalizing the relationship should contribute to the global development of the sport and ensure successful participation by blind tennis athletes at the 2027 Games. This is an important indication of direction, although IBSA stated in early 2026, in its decision on the hosting of the Games, that final proposals for the list of sports still needed to be prepared as part of the organizational process. It is therefore more accurate to speak of a publicly confirmed plan and institutional objective of including blind tennis than to say that the final competition programme has been published in every detail.
The 2027 IBSA World Games will be held in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. On 30 July 2026, the federation announced the dates of 26 May to 6 June 2027, after the Executive Board had already approved the hosting agreement with Uzbek partners in January. The Games are one of IBSA's most important multisport events and are expected to bring together a range of disciplines for blind and visually impaired athletes. For blind tennis, participation in Tashkent would carry additional significance because it would take place following the transition to the new governance structure, giving the new committee a major international stage on which to apply the standards and procedures that will be developed over the coming months. At the same time, continuity with Birmingham 2023 would demonstrate that the discipline is not merely a temporary addition to the programme of major competitions.
Greater visibility does not automatically mean Paralympic status
The entry of blind tennis into IBSA's permanent structure represents stronger international recognition, but it should not be equated with inclusion in the Paralympic Games programme. IBSA governs and develops several sports for blind and visually impaired people, while decisions on the Paralympic Games programme go through separate procedures within the International Paralympic Committee and the organizational cycle of individual Games. The new committee therefore primarily creates a more stable platform for sports development, international competitions, classification and standards. In the long term, an organized global system can increase the discipline's visibility and credibility, but it does not in itself guarantee future Paralympic status. For now, the immediate priorities are far more concrete: successfully transferring the functions of the IBTA, appointing the committee's leadership and linking the existing international community with IBSA's systems.
Cooperation with the ITF will also remain important in that process. The memorandum of October 2025 established a framework in which the global governing body for tennis can share its experience in governance, development, classification and equipment standardization, while blind tennis retains the specific features required by athletes with different levels of visual impairment. The Australian Open showed that there is space for a greater presence at established tennis events, while Vilnius will demonstrate the strength of a standalone world competition. The combination of these two paths - a greater presence within the tennis ecosystem and a more stable place within international sport for the blind - could be crucial to the next phase of development.
The establishment of the permanent IBSA Blind Tennis Committee is therefore more than a change of name or organizational address. It moves the sport from a model in which a separate international association built the rules and network of members into a model in which key functions are expected to become part of a larger international system for sports for people with visual impairments. How successful that change will be will become clear through the quality of competitions, clarity of classification, accessibility of the sport in new countries and the ability to retain the knowledge of the people who have developed it over decades. The first major moment of the new era arrives as early as 23 August in Vilnius, where the global blind tennis community will gather for the year's most important competition at a time when its international position is entering a new phase.
Sources:
- International Blind Sports Federation (IBSA) - decision to establish the permanent Blind Tennis Committee, the history of the sport and the process of integrating the IBTA into IBSA (link)
- International Blind Sports Federation (IBSA) - earlier cooperation between IBSA and IBTA, membership growth and blind tennis participation at the 2023 IBSA World Games, as well as the plan for 2027 (link)
- International Tennis Federation (ITF) - memorandum with the IBTA on global development, governance, classification and equipment standardization (link)
- Australian Open - information on the first Blind and Low Vision Showdown in the programme of a Grand Slam tournament and adapted rules for categories B1-B4 (link)
- Blind Sport LT / official championship website - dates, location, number of countries, participants and organizational information for the 2026 World Championships in Vilnius (link)
- International Blind Sports Federation (IBSA) - hosting of the 2027 IBSA World Games in Tashkent and the organizational framework of the Games (link)
- International Blind Sports Federation (IBSA) - current dates of the 2027 IBSA World Games, from 26 May to 6 June 2027 (link)