This site is about the EuroGames — the European LGBTQ+ multi-sport festival — and about the wider tradition of inclusive amateur sport it belongs to. It is an independent site. It is not run by the organisers of any edition, it is not the European Gay & Lesbian Sport Federation, and nothing here is an official announcement of anything. For anything official, go to the EGLSF directly.
What we do instead is the thing an event's own website never has room for: explain the subject. Why sport specifically produced a need for its own festivals when most other social spaces did not. How you build a competition where a first-timer and a former international both get a proper race. What the amateur multi-sport format is actually for. And, because the domain is a Stockholm one, what the host-city context looks like here.
What the EuroGames is
The event, the federation behind it, and where it sits alongside the Gay Games and the rest of the inclusive-sport calendar.
How the sport is organised
Divisions by ability rather than qualification, self-declared levels, and why that structure is the whole design.
Competing as an amateur
Who actually turns up, how to seed yourself honestly, and a pace calculator for working out what you are capable of.
LGBTQ+ sport in Sweden and Europe
The Swedish club model, the legal picture, and why the club level is where inclusion is decided.
Stockholm as a host city
A city on fourteen islands, one transport authority, and the practical norms that catch visitors out.
Training outdoors here
The Swedish right to roam, swimming inside the city limits, shoreline running, and winter.
Seasons and daylight
A calculator for how much usable light a date gives you at this latitude. It matters more than the temperature.
Why a festival, and not just a fixture list
Mainstream sport is the last major social institution in much of Europe where being openly LGBTQ+ still carries a measurable cost. Not primarily through formal exclusion — few rulebooks say anything — but through changing rooms, team banter, coaching cultures and the ordinary assumption that everyone present is straight. The measurable consequence is drop-out: people who leave sport in adolescence and never come back.
An inclusive multi-sport festival is a direct answer to that. It is not a protest and it is not a novelty division of an existing championship. It is a functioning amateur competition, run to the relevant sports' own rules, where the default assumption is reversed for a week. That turns out to matter far more than the medals do, which is why participation rather than performance is the organising principle throughout — see how the sport is organised for how that is actually built.
The other half of a festival like this is that it moves. Host cities rotate around Europe, which means each edition inherits a different set of facilities, a different local club scene and a different legal climate. Stockholm is one of the cities that has hosted, and the host-city page is about what that context looks like from the ground.