Chile occupies a narrow strip of more than 4,300 kilometers in South America, between the Andes mountain range and the Pacific Ocean, with landscapes as different as the Atacama Desert in the north and Patagonia in the south. It declared independence in 1810 and today has close to 18.5 million inhabitants, largely concentrated in the Santiago Metropolitan Region, its capital.
The country has a long tradition of world-class tennis: Marcelo RÃos reached number one in the ATP rankings in 1998, Fernando González and Nicolás Massú won Olympic medals in Athens 2004, including gold in doubles, and Patricio Cornejo reached doubles finals at Roland Garros and the US Open, in addition to holding the record for most appearances in the history of Chile’s Davis Cup team. Add to that a growing padel community, which formed the base of racquet players on which pickleball would later grow.
The sport first took hold informally around 2021 — with the country’s first courts at the club founded by Cornejo himself — until October 2023, when the Ministry of Sport officially recognized it as a sporting discipline. Growth has been steady ever since: new facilities, specialized clubs, and, more recently, a national federative structure taking shape, not without institutional tensions, as more than one organization currently presents itself as the sport’s national representative.
