Talk about play getting bogged down...

July 30, 2017 12:58 PM

A recent sports piece in the New York Times asked: How did Finland become such fertile ground for wacky sports? In the case of swamp soccer (or football, if you prefer), it started as a tournament in 1998 that has grown into an annual championship hosted in Hyrynsalmi. Players compete on a boggy pitch where they can quickly find themselves up to their waists in mud.
posted by mandolin conspiracy (5 comments total)

It says something that Finland's weird sports scene has such astonishing depth that the Times article can get away with not mentioning pesäpollo at all.
posted by Earthtopus at 1:08 PM on July 30, 2017

This makes me wildly happy. It's as though people were doing things because they are fun, with no grown-ups to stop them.
posted by jet_silver at 1:11 PM on July 30, 2017 [4 favorites]

Swamp football kinda looks like the extreme version of football in the 70s, before stuff like "hybrid grass", "pitch drainning" or "groundskeepers" became a thing.
posted by lmfsilva at 1:24 PM on July 30, 2017

I'd wager that my countrymen are among the most self-deprecating in the world and almost certainly have the lowest self-esteem. Finns, collectively, are obsessed about what the rest of the world thinks about them—or obsessed about getting the rest of the world to think about us at all. My guess is that when wife-carrying got international attention, it encouraged us to think outside the box and truly embrace the weirdness when it comes to organizing sporting events. Our quirky national character is among our best cultural exports, I guess.
posted by jklaiho at 3:35 PM on July 30, 2017 [6 favorites]

"More recently, thousands of Finns, most of them teenage girls, have taken up competitive hobbyhorsing, wherein competitors trot and hurdle obstacles while riding the wooden toys."

This is my favorite. Last summer my neighborhood in Helsinki was suddenly filled with girls running around on hobbyhorses. It was such an unexpected and joyful sight. Here's more info.
posted by Kattullus at 5:10 PM on July 30, 2017 [4 favorites]