The Outgames have to be seen to be believed, writes Joe Muraca and Dan Witthaus.

Pressed between a wildly excited Dutch team and volleyballers from the home country, you’ve been in the marshalling zone for hours.

You’ve made 100 new friends and have met your next husband or wife on at least five separate occasions.

Suddenly, the announcer calls “Australia” and you enter the stadium to the roar of thousands in the crowd.

Such is the joy and surprise for those who are part of an Outgames opening ceremony.

Even for the most cynical among us, there’s not much that can top the feeling of marching at an international sporting meet into a packed stadium. The informality of it all means it tops an Olympics, fun-wise anyway.

Montreal in ‘06 set the standard and now, with less than 12 months to go, Copenhagen is heading down the home straight before the festivities begin on July 25, 2009. You may think it’s far away, but there’s much to do if you’re planning on attending; and much to think about if you’re still not sure.

You may have been inspired by Aussie performances in Beijing. You may be hell bent on defending a hard-won gold medal from last time. Or, you may just want to spend summer in Europe with 15,000 LGBT athletes. There are many valid reasons to go, but whatever the reason – even the most shallow – be sure to get there any way you can.

‘But why?’ you might ask.

There’s the sport, of course. It doesn’t matter if you lack natural talent; experience shows you’ll probably have more fun! There’s no gay Australian Institute of Sport, and you don’t need to meet any LGBT ‘A Standard’ qualifying times. Participation, not victory, is genuinely the main goal.

And away from the sporting fields, the Outgames offers a point of difference to the Gay Games in that it hosts a concurrent conference on human rights.

Even if you luck out in your own sport, just going and watching your fellow Aussies do their thing is a hoot. Half the fun is had in the crowd. It’s truly somewhere where the world meets.

But there’s much more to it than that. We don’t want to get into the debate about whether there’s such a thing as a gay community. What we will say is that it’s hard not to feel a part of something larger, and special, when converging with thousands of other homos from around the globe, albeit mostly developed nations. The Outgames tends to draw the Europeans in droves whereas last time around the Gay Games was more of a Mecca for the Americans.

Although the city does become ‘gay’, past games have shown that locals will embrace you and the spirit of the games. On the trains and in the street, everyone will ask where you’re from and what sport you’re playing. You may get a little tired of telling the same story, but you’ll never tire of the welcome the locals provide.

Ask anyone who went to Montreal and the response is almost always the same: a smile, a superlative and a sigh.

So what should you be doing now? Well: choose a sport and register. Flights, accommodation and your training regime are next. For the more shallow among you, be sure to start working on your beach muscles.

Just make sure you do it once before you die.

Discounted early-bird registration for the World Outgames closes on September 30, 2008: www.copenhagen2009.org

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