Reykjavík Grapevine - 03.02.2017, Side 66

L I F E , T R AV E L & E N T E R TA I N M E N T I N I C E L A N D
Issue 02 × 2017
Feb. 3 - Mar. 9
www.grapevine.is
Handball:
We don’t care
anymore
By HELGI ÞÓR
HARÐARSON
The success of the Icelan-
dic national football team
at Euro 2016 last summer
was far from victimless. Roy
Hodgson had to resign from
his post as England man-
ager and English fans were left with scars on their
confidence that will probably never fully heal.
✈ ✈ ✈
Another victim of the team’s famous campaign
is the Icelandic men's national handball team.
Most Grapevine readers probably have little clue
what handball is. But here in Iceland, handball
has long been considered our “national sport.”
For the uninitiated, to cut a long story short,
handball is water polo without the water.
Since our independence in 1944, handball
has consistently been the only team sport in
which we stood a reasonable chance of beat-
ing another nation. The greatest achievement
of the handball team was winning a silver
medal at the Beijing Olympics in 2008, where
the mighty Icelandic team brushed aside great
nations like Spain, Germany and Russia on
their path to second-place glory.
In those days the Viking clap was nothing
more than a particularly nasty STD. The Ice-
landic football team would regularly lose to the
likes of Liechtenstein and Malta and we sat firm
in 112th place in the Fifa rankings. But those
days are long forgotten...
✈ ✈ ✈
At the time of writing, the Icelandic handball
team is competing at the handball World Cup
in France. As recently as a year ago, this would
have meant planes crowded with Iceland sup-
porters intent on urging their team to become
World Champions (or at least runners-up).
Instead, flights intended to get the support-
ers to France were cancelled, with the airline
citing a lack of interest as the reason. It now
looks like the opportunistic Icelanders feel
they’ve bigger fish to fry on the football field
than the handball court. This reveals, of course,
that Icelanders don’t really care which sport
they watch, as long as there’s the promise of a
large scalp they can hang above their mantle-
piece when the final whistle is blown.
So in the end, it's more about bragging rights
than sporting glory. And, well: I’d be the first
to admit that bragging to foreigners about Ice-
land's handball achievements just wasn't satis-
fying when met with the inevitable question:
"What is handball?"
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