HYRYNSALMI, Finland — There’s something strange going on in Finland. Over the past few decades, as it has all but disappeared from the global sports stage, this humble Nordic nation has sort of lost its sports mind.
More than 2,000 people ventured to the remote backwaters of central Finland recently for the 20th annual Swamp Soccer World Championships. If you and your spouse want to compete in the Wife Carrying World Championships, you must come to Finland. The Mobile Phone Throwing World Championships? Finland. The World Berry Picking Championship and the Air Guitar World Championships? Finland and Finland.
“We have some weird hobbies,” said Paivi Kemppainen, 26, a staff member at the swamp soccer competition and master of the understatement.
Just look at swamp soccer in Hyrynsalmi, a place where Jetta can achieve a small level of celebrity over the years. Jetta is a stuffed badger ensconced in a bird cage. She acts as a mascot of sorts for a team of 12 friends who make the seven-hour drive each year from Vihti, near Helsinki, for the competition. They bought the doll seven years ago from a junk store at a highway rest stop, and her fame around the swamp has grown ever since. A couple of years ago, she was interviewed by a local newspaper.
On Saturday morning, the men stood around shivering in threadbare thrift-store suits, which they said were their team’s official warm-up duds. A bottle of vodka was being passed around (their preferred way, apparently, of warming up). It was about 10 o’clock. Soon it would be time for their first game of the day. They set Jetta aside and stripped off their outerwear, revealing skimpy blue wrestling singlets.
Before they treaded into the mud, they were asked a question: Why?
This streak of strenuous irreverence began sweeping through the quiet Finnish countryside in the mid-1990s, and has only grown since.
In 1995, a Finn named Henri Pellonpaa killed a world-record 21 bugs in five minutes at the Mosquito Killing World Championships in Pelkosenniemi.
The World Sauna Championships were heavily contested in Heinola from 1999 to 2010, until a competitor died from third-degree burns.
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.
How did this happen? How did Finland become such fertile ground for wacky sports?
Finland is the most thinly populated country in the European Union. It boasts endless forests and almost 200,000 lakes, and its residents enjoy “Everyman rights,” which guarantee public access to most outdoor lands and bodies of water for recreational purposes. The European Commission consistently ranks Finns as among the most physically active people on the continent.
Straddling the Arctic Circle, Finland endures long, punishingly dark winters. Summer therefore marks a period of national catharsis. It helps that the country has an estimated 500,000 summer cottages, and because many Finns receive up to six weeks of vacation time per year, the act of unhurriedly passing time outdoors feels almost like a national birthright.
The mosquito-killing contest, for instance, was invented by a Finnish businessman named Kai Kullervo Salmijarvi as a summertime diversion for his children.
In Hyrynsalmi, the swamp soccer games were just one component of the weekend fun. Finns from all over the country — there were also a few teams from Russia — effectively doubled the population of the small town, where road signs warning of crossing moose dot the quiet roadways.
On Friday and Saturday nights, after everyone had cleaned the swamp water off their faces, there were loud rock concerts in the parking lot of a local resort until 2 a.m., when the soft glow of the sun was still visible over the hills.