Heineken Pickleball World Cup 2026: Sport’s Showcase Sets Two Guinness World Records
Da Nang didn’t just host a the Heineken Pickleball World Cup. It also set two world records doing it.
Some tournaments make headlines for who wins. This one made headlines before a single point had been played, and Guinness World Records had already got involved twice over.
The Heineken Pickleball World Cup 2026 opened on the evening of 2 September at Tien Son Sports Arena in Da Nang, coinciding with Vietnam’s National Day. By the time the ceremony wrapped up, organisers had two separate world records confirmed. The first: the most countries and territories ever represented by athletes at a single host location for a pickleball event. The second, rather more unusual: the most valuable trophy of its kind to date.
Between them, the two records tell you almost everything you need to know about the ambition behind this tournament—it wasn’t simply trying to be big. It was trying to be unmistakably, measurably the biggest of its kind anywhere.
The Numbers Behind the First Record
Nearly 5,000 registered athletes made the trip to Da Nang, representing more than 80 countries and territories in total, with over 65 nations and territories actually taking the court once competition got underway. That’s not a figure that happens by accident — it takes years of relationship-building across federations, sponsors, and national teams to convince that many countries to send athletes to a single event, and it marks the first time a Pickleball World Cup has been staged anywhere in Asia.
The field reads like a genuine cross-section of the sport’s global reach. International names including France’s Jay Devilliers, India’s Harsh Mehta, the Netherlands’ Roos Van Reek, Australia’s Nicola Schoeman, and the United States’ Vivian Glozman all made the trip, alongside a strong home contingent led by Do Minh Quan, Phuc Huynh, Quang Duong, and Ly Hoang Nam. Vietnam’s own Open team was drawn into Group A alongside Colombia, the Cayman Islands, and Chile — about as varied a group stage as international pickleball has ever produced.
A Trophy Worth Its Own Headline
The second record is the one that tends to raise eyebrows. Somewhere in the planning for this tournament, organisers decided the trophy itself needed to make history too, and the result is now officially the most valuable trophy of its kind ever produced for the sport. It’s an unusual thing to build a record around, but it fits the tone of an opening ceremony that clearly wasn’t interested in doing anything by half measures.
That ceremony leaned fully into spectacle. A parade brought all 65 competing national and territorial teams onto the field together, followed by a “Road to Glory” drum performance staged by more than 1,000 officers, soldiers, and cadets from the People’s Police Academy—a production scaled more like an Olympic opening than a single-sport tournament launch, timed deliberately to coincide with National Day celebrations.
Why the Records Actually Matter
City leaders were candid about what they saw as the real point of the whole spectacle. The tournament’s greatest value, according to Da Nang officials, isn’t really the records themselves, impressive as they are—it’s the fact that so many nations, languages, and cultures ended up sharing the same space at once, with sport doing the work of building friendships that might not otherwise have formed.
Records make for good headlines, and Da Nang now has two genuinely rare ones to its name. But the pitch from the city itself suggests the bigger achievement was simply getting this many countries into one arena together in the first place—the records, in that telling, are just the proof that it actually happened.
