2000s Disney Channel Stars Had Their Own Olympics, and It’s Pure Nostalgia

While the Tokyo Olympics has brought the greatest athletes from around the world together to compete for the gold, some of the more nostalgic among us are still longing for a reprise of the Disney Channel Games. If you were a Disney Channel fan in the mid-2000s, you might remember some of the network’s biggest stars coming together during the summers of 2006-2008 at Disney’s Wide World of Sports in Orlando to compete in wacky challenges for the win.

Working together as teams to compete for a charity of their choice, some of Disney’s biggest stars competed in challenges, including the hamster ball race and Chariot of Champions, an event where three players had to sit in a chariot built by the team while two of their teammates would push them along the track.

Some of the biggest names in Hollywood were players in the games, including Nick, Joe and Kevin Jonas, Selena Gomez, Demi Lovato, Cole and Dylan Sprouse and Brenda Song. Other competitors included Mitchel Musso and Jason Earles of Hannah Montana and Adrienne Bailon, Kiely Williams Sabrina Bryan and Kunal Sharma of The Cheetah Girls franchise. In addition, big names from Spain, Taiwan, Japan, Canada, India, Mexico, Brazil, Australia and other countries around the world were on hand to really give the games an Olympic feel.

Hosting the games in person were Phill Lewis and Brian Stepanek, but Disney Channel also had some more animated personalities pop in to add a little spice, including the Christy Carlson Romano-voiced Kim Possible.”What’s cool is kids get to see our talent in a different way,” Adam Sanderson, senior vice president of brand marketing for Disney, told New York Daily News in 2008. “They know them as characters on TV. They know them from the celebrity factor. But they don’t get to see them out there in a T-shirt and shorts, getting dirty, getting sweaty and just being kids.”

Speaking more about the “ambitious” nature of the show, Sanderson noted, “I can’t think of another project where we have the majority of our talent together at one time. They get to spent time with each other. The U.S. kids get to meet kids from all over the world. There’s a real cultural sharing that happens between our talent. … At the end of the day, they’re everyday ‘tweens and teens.”