NCT turn a milestone year into a sports day
NCT have marked their tenth anniversary by staging their own version of the Idol Star Athletics Championships, bringing members of all their units together for a two-team competition. Soompi reported on 21 October 2026 that the event, billed as the NCT Athletics Championships, was shared in full with subtitles, so fans can watch the whole thing rather than catch only clips.
The line-up is the story here. Rather than a single unit carrying a variety booking, the rosters draw across NCT 127, NCT Dream, WayV and NCT WISH, with members split into Team White and Team Pink. For a group whose public output usually arrives unit by unit, an occasion that puts that many members in the same room, wearing the same team colours and competing for the same scoreboard, is a different kind of television from a comeback stage or a unit interview.
The sports are familiar from school fields and holiday specials alike: tug of war, a game of catch the tail, dodgeball and a relay race. It is a deliberately broad mix, pairing strength events with chase games and finishing with the race that traditionally decides the mood of a sports day.
Why there was no ISAC this Chuseok
The timing matters. The Idol Star Athletics Championships launched in 2010 and has become a fixture of MBC's holiday variety output, with idol groups competing across athletics events. According to Soompi, the championships were not held for Chuseok this year because the holiday overlapped with the Asian Games.
That leaves a gap in the calendar where a multi-group sports special would normally sit, and NCT's in-house version fills a similar appetite on a smaller scale. The comparison is worth making carefully: this is not ISAC with one roster instead of many, and it is not presented as a replacement for the MBC show. It is an anniversary project with its own framing, built around a group rather than an industry.
Still, the format carries the same appeal. Sports-day events reward the things idol variety rarely has time for: unscripted physical comedy, unexpected competence, and the sight of people who usually perform choreography together trying to coordinate a tug-of-war instead.
How the two teams were drawn
Team White was led by captain Ryo and comprised Taeyong, Kun, Jaehyun, Xiaojun, Haechan, Jaemin, Chenle, Yushi and Jaehee. Team Pink was led by captain Sakuya and listed Johnny, Yuta, Hendery, Renjun, Jeno, YangYang, Jisung, Sion and Riku.
The important detail is the mixing. Neither side is a unit. Members who spend most of their working lives in separate NCT 127, NCT Dream, WayV and NCT WISH schedules appear on the same team, which changes the social dynamic on screen. Variety chemistry usually depends on who already knows whom; here, the captains had to organise a group of people whose usual colleagues are scattered across the other bench.
Naming Ryo and Sakuya as captains also hands the organising role to two of the group's younger members, a small but telling choice in an anniversary project. The veterans are participants rather than figureheads, and the teams are led from a different generation of the group's line-up.
Tug of war, catch the tail, dodgeball and a relay
The four events cover distinct skills. Tug of war is about weight, grip and coordination, and it tends to expose whether a team has worked out a rhythm before the whistle. Catch the tail, the game where competitors chase and snatch a tag from an opponent's waistband, rewards speed and evasion, and produces the kind of close-quarters chaos that cameras love. Dodgeball is the most tactical of the set: elimination, target selection and the question of who is willing to stand at the back.
The relay closes the programme, and it is the event most likely to be remembered. Relays turn individual moments into a collective result, so a dropped baton or a fast final leg can swing the whole day. They also give a group with this many members a way to use all of them in one continuous sequence rather than in short bursts.
Soompi's report sets out the line-ups and the events rather than the results, so viewers wanting to know who took each discipline have the full show to watch.
Yuta sits out through injury
One name on the Team Pink roster did not take part. Yuta was listed for the team but sat out the games because of an injury, according to the report, which gives no further detail about its nature or severity. That is a straightforward limitation on what can be said about his condition, and it should be read that way.
His absence does affect the shape of the competition, though only in the broadest sense. A team sport day is built on numbers, and Team Pink's plans for the strength events in particular would have been drawn up with a full roster in mind. Whatever the adjustment, the format absorbs it: the teams were announced with Yuta named, and the games went ahead without him on the field.
What a full-group outing adds to an anniversary year
NCT's structure is unusual in K-pop. The name covers several fixed units with distinct rosters, musical identities and release schedules, and most of what fans see in a given month is one of those units at work. Full-group occasions are therefore a different proposition: they are where the umbrella name becomes visible rather than implied.
That makes this kind of project useful for an anniversary. A tenth year invites reflection on the whole enterprise, and a sports day is a low-stakes way to stage that reflection without a formal concert or a documentary. Nobody has to deliver a speech about a decade together; they have to win a tug-of-war, and the audience supplies the meaning.
There is also a practical function. Cross-unit television gives viewers a reason to follow members whose units they do not normally track, and it puts newer names alongside established ones in a setting where seniority buys nothing on the dodgeball court. For a group that has expanded repeatedly over ten years, that kind of mixing is one of the few formats that scales.
The takeaway
NCT's tenth-anniversary sports day is a modest idea executed at a scale only a group this size can manage: twenty members named across two teams, four events, and a full subtitled show for anyone who wants the results rather than the summary. It arrives in a year when the usual holiday athletics special did not run, but it stands on its own as an anniversary gesture, mixing units, handing the captaincy to younger members and letting a roster compete instead of perform.
Whether it becomes a template for other large groups is a question for later. For now, the appeal is simpler: a decade-old group playing dodgeball against itself, with the teams drawn deliberately across the divides that usually define it.