Bandy

• 1. Introduction

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  Bandy is a winter sport played on a sheet of ice roughly the size of a football pitch, where eleven players per side use curved sticks to drive a cork-cored ball into the opposing team's goal. That detail alone sets it apart: the field runs 90 to 110 metres long and 45 to 65 metres wide, dwarfing the rinks used for ice hockey. In Russia, more than one million people are estimated to play it. The Federation of International Bandy has claimed it is the world's second-most participated winter sport after ice hockey. Yet most people outside northern Europe and Central Asia have never heard of it.

  How did a sport with ancient roots in the frozen fens of East Anglia grow into a game with professional leagues in Russia and Sweden, world championships on multiple continents, and a demonstrated link to floorball, field hockey, and ice hockey itself? The answers reach back to the English countryside of 1813, run through a compromise hammered out in 1955, and include a single afternoon in Oslo in 1952 when a crowd of 3,000 watched Norway pull off an upset that nobody had predicted.

• 2. Roots in the Fens

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  Bandy's early modernization can be traced to 1813 in the Fens of East Anglia, where large sheets of ice formed on flooded meadows and shallow washes during cold winters. Fen skating had been a tradition there since at least medieval times, and players began organizing stick-and-ball games on those natural surfaces.

  The sport's first published set of organized rules was codified in 1882 by Charles Goodman Tebbutt of the Bury Fen Bandy Club. Those rules drew heavily from association football, which was already popular in England. Like football, a bandy match runs two halves of 45 minutes each, with 11 players per side. The first international match was played in 1891, when Bury Fen hosted the Haarlemsche Hockey and Bandy Club from the Netherlands, a club that through later mergers became HC Bloemendaal. That same year the National Bandy Association was established in England as the sport's first governing body.

  A surviving stick from this period, held in the collections of the Museum of Cambridge, has a length of rope twisted around the handle. The rope was there to rescue a player who fell through the ice, since early games were played on frozen lakes. An 1899 photograph of two players shows the sticks being held single-handed. The game called "hockey on the ice" was demonstrated as a curiosity at The Crystal Palace in London in 1875, an event later described as "the original bandy match".

• 3. Names and Neighbors

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  The English word bandy descends from the Middle French bander, meaning to strike back and forth, and originally described a seventeenth-century Irish game similar to field hockey. The curved stick itself was also called a bandy. Yet the sport has never settled on one name worldwide.

  In Russia it is called "Russian hockey" or, more officially, "hockey with a ball," while ice hockey is "hockey with a puck." Speakers of Finnish call bandy jääpallo, or "ice ball," versus jääkiekko, "ice puck," for ice hockey. Estonian and Lithuanian speakers use the same ice ball construction. Scottish Gaelic names it camanachd-deighe, or "ice shinty." Mandarin Chinese speakers call it 班迪球, "bandy ball." In Sweden the nickname "winter football" took hold because of the sport's structural kinship with association football.

  That kinship was not coincidental. Clubs in England, Norway, and Sweden regularly fielded both football and bandy sections, with athletes competing in one sport during summer and the other in winter. Nottingham Forest Football and Bandy Club, now known simply as Nottingham Forest, is one example. The Swedish player Orvar Bergmark won silver medals in world championships of both sports during the 1950s. Sten-Ove Ramberg is recorded as the last Swedish male player to represent the national team in both sports, appearing for bandy in 1978 and for football from 1979 to 1984.

• 4. Birth of a Global Federation

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  Until 1955 there was no international body governing bandy. The sport had been played across northern Europe for decades, featured at the Nordic Games from 1901 to 1926, and even appeared as a demonstration sport at the 1952 Oslo Olympics, yet it lacked a single set of international rules. The Federation of International Bandy was formed in February 1955 as a compromise between Russian and English rules, with the English framework prevailing in most respects. One Russian contribution did survive: the low border running along most of the two sidelines, which all countries adopted.

  The first Bandy World Championship for men was held in 1957. The Soviet Union won every championship until 1981, a streak of eleven consecutive gold medals. Sweden broke that run in 1981 and won again in 1983. Finland is the only other country to have claimed the title, winning the 2004 championship held in Västerås, Sweden.

  The IOC recognized bandy as a sport in 2001, and in 2004 the FIB was fully accepted into the Association of IOC Recognised International Sports Federations. Despite that recognition, the sport has not appeared at the Olympics beyond that single 1952 demonstration. The Olympic Charter requires a sport to be widely practiced by men in at least 75 countries and on four continents; the IOC has identified a gap between bandy's participation rates and its global audience reach as a barrier to full inclusion.

• 5. The Oslo Upset of 1952

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  Finland defeated Norway 3-2 in front of 500 fans in the first match of the 1952 Oslo Olympic demonstration. Later that same day the crowd grew to 3,000 to watch Norway face Sweden. Norway, considered the underdog against their larger neighbor, won 2-1. It was recorded as Norway's first ever victory against Sweden in bandy. In the final game, Sweden beat Finland 4-0.

  That afternoon planted a seed. The Soviets had not sent a team to Oslo in 1952, having remained outside international competition for decades. After watching the tournament unfold, they reconsidered their position. When the Federation of International Bandy was formed in February 1955, the Soviet Union was among its founding members, and by 1957 Soviet teams were competing in the first world championship and beginning the run of dominance that would last more than two decades.

  Norway's finest result at the World Championship to date remains a second-place finish in 1965. The 2022 championship, scheduled to be held in Russia, was cancelled by the FIB after many national federations declined to participate because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

• 6. Russia, Sweden, and the Ball

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  A similar game became popular among the Russian nobility in the early 1700s. The imperial court of Peter the Great played a predecessor of modern bandy on Saint Petersburg's frozen Neva river, using ordinary footwear and sticks made of juniper wood. Ice skates came later. Bandy did not spread beyond the nobility to the broader Russian population until the second half of the 19th century, and the predecessor of the current Russian Bandy Federation was founded in 1898.

  One physical detail distinguished Russian players for generations: they traditionally used a longer skate blade than other nations, which let them skate faster in straight lines while making quick turns harder. The bandy ball itself has two approved sizes: 62.4 mm in diameter for the standard ball and 63.8 mm for what the rules call the "Russian ball." Originally bandy balls were red; they are now orange or cerise. The sticks are crooked and come in five angles of bend, with bend 4 being the most common at the professional level. No stick may exceed 127 cm in length or 7 cm in width.

  In Sweden the sport became the most popular spectator sport in the mid-twentieth century, drawing larger crowds than football or ice hockey. A tradition called annandagsbandy, bandy games played on a specific winter holiday, remains a fixture. Spectators historically brought bandyportföljen, well-worn brown leather bags holding a thermos of warm drink or a bottle of liquor against the cold of outdoor arenas. Sweden today has more indoor bandy arenas than all other countries combined, and the Bandy World Cup, held annually for club teams in Ljusdal since the 1970s and moved indoors to Sandviken in 2009, draws the top clubs from the two countries whose professional leagues are considered the best in the world.

• 7. How the Game Is Played

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  Elite bandy players average a skating velocity of over 16 km/h, with speeds in some cases reaching 37 km/h on a field that stretches up to 110 metres long. The goal cage, centered on each short line, is 3.5 metres wide and 2.1 metres high, making it the largest goal cage used in any organized winter team sport. The penalty spot sits 12 metres in front of the goal; the penalty area itself is a half-circle with a 17 metre radius.

  Goalkeepers are the only players permitted to use their hands, and only within that penalty area. All other players may not intentionally play the ball with their heads, hands, or arms. Shouldering is allowed in checking situations, but body checking and fighting are prohibited. Play restarts through one of six methods: a stroke-off, a goal throw, a corner stroke, a free stroke, a penalty shot, or a face-off.

  The card system differs from football. A yellow card is a warning issued to the entire team, not an individual. A white card signals a five-minute penalty. A blue card traditionally indicates a ten-minute penalty. A red card is a full match penalty. A player who receives a time penalty for the third time in one match receives a personal penalty and misses the rest of the game. If conditions become extreme, the format adapts: at the 1999 World Championship, held in severe cold, some matches were divided into four periods of 15 minutes each with extended breaks between them.

• 8. Descendants and Variants

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  Bandy is regarded as a predecessor of ice hockey. Stick-and-ball games resembling bandy were brought to North America by the 1800s; those games became antecedents of ice hockey, whose first rules were codified in Canada in 1875. Before Canadians introduced ice hockey into Europe in the early 20th century, hockey was simply another name for bandy in much of the continent. Ice hockey surpassed bandy in most of Europe partly because it became an Olympic sport while bandy had not, and because smaller ice rinks are easier to maintain in countries with short winters.

  The highest altitude at which bandy has ever been played is in Khorugh, the capital of the Tajik autonomous province of Gorno-Badakhshan, situated 2,200 metres above sea level in the Pamir Mountains. The Women's Bandy World Cup, the club competition for women's teams, held its inaugural edition in 2007, and women's regular league play dates to the 1970s in Sweden and Finland, extending to Norway and the Soviet Union in the 1980s.