Bandy (game)

Bandy is the world's second-most popular winter sport. Related to ice hockey, it developed independently, with the rules first codified in England in the nineteenth century after centuries of a similar game having been played in frozen fields and lakes throughout northern Europe and Russia. Bandy contains many familiar elements of stick and ball games, pitting two teams against each other on a frozen surface (typically an artificially frozen field), each using sticks to manipulate the bandy ball in attempts to knock it into the opposing team's goal. Though overtaken by ice hockey in most of Europe after hockey became an Olympic sport, bandy remains popular in Russia and is widely played by many northern European soccer clubs.

Although twenty-eight countries belong to the Federation of International Bandy, the sport is dominated by Russia, Sweden, and Finland. Clubs from those three countries have won every World Cup and the national teams of those countries are the only ones to have won gold medals in the Bandy World Championships.

In the United States, bandy is popular mainly at the youth level, while organized league bandy is concentrated primarily in Minnesota, which is also home to the arena where the national team practices.

Origins and History

Stick and ball games, the ancestors of hockey (both ice and field) and bandy, have been played in Europe since the ancient era. The Viking sport of Knattleikr, played at least as early as the ninth century, was sometimes played on frozen fields and may have also been played on ice surfaces, such as frozen ponds. Ice skates, a key technology for ice sports, are attested in Scandinavia in 3000 BCE made from animal bone, with metal skates appearing in the third century CE. However, early skates were used more like modern skis, with poles used to propel the skater forward.

As with many sports that cannot be credited to a specific creator, the exact origins of bandy are difficult to pinpoint. The term bandy itself is English and is probably borrowed from the Welsh sport of bando, a game similar to field hockey first attested in the late eighteenth century and soon popular as a spectator sport drawing crowds of thousands.

The English seem to have first used the term bandy to refer to a game played by skate-wearing players on ice in flooded meadows, and rules for that game were first published by the Bury Fen Bandy Club in 1882. But the sport closely resembles one played in Russia in the tenth century, and modern bandy has proven extremely popular in Russia. As with other sports origins, this could be a matter of multiple independent invention: the Bury Fen rules differ from the way the game was played in the tenth century, though to be fair, twenty-first-century baseball is not played by the same rules as nineteenth-century baseball either, and historians don't consider them two different sports. It could also be that a proto-bandy sport played on ice was played throughout a large part of northern Europe, possibly related to Knattleikr, and because rules were not codified, the norms of play naturally varied across space and time.

The National Bandy Association was formed in England in 1891, and bandy spread to other European nations quickly, with a European Bandy Championship held for the first time in 1913. Bandy has strong historical ties with association football (soccer): Not only are the English rules influenced by soccer's rules, but many European soccer clubs in the twentieth century alternated between soccer and bandy according to the season. While this tradition had dwindled by the twenty-first century, a small number maintain it, notably the Norwegian club Mjondalen IF.

Rules and Regulations

The rules of bandy are maintained by the Federation of International Bandy's Rules and Referee Committee and are periodically updated.

Unlike ice hockey, which uses a flat puck, bandy uses a ball called the bandy ball, which has a cork core surrounded by natural or synthetic rubber. It comes in two sizes, the standard bandy ball with a diameter of 62.4 millimeters (about 2.4 inches, or the size of a tennis ball) and the Russian ball of 63.8 millimeters (about 2.5 inches). Either type may be used in an official game, but the same type must be used throughout the game. The same is true for the color of the ball, which is either red (the original color, after the historic cork balls were first coated in rubber), orange, or reddish pink. Rink bandy uses the same ball as bandy, but rinkball uses a slightly different ball colored blue. The bandy stick is wood or synthetic, may not contain metal, and is crooked at the end. Bandy sticks come in five styles according to the angle of the bend, with Bend 4 (the second-most acute angle) the most common style in professional bandy.

Bandy is played with between eight and eleven players on a team, each of whom wears skates and protective gear and uses a bandy stick. It is rare for a team to start a game with fewer than eleven players, but it is permitted. Each team competes to knock the ball into the other team's goal using their sticks. The goals are placed on opposite ends of a rectangle of ice roughly the same size as a soccer field (much larger than a hockey rink), a sign of bandy's historical relationship with soccer and soccer clubs. Bandy fields vary in size and can range from 148 to 213 feet by 300 to 360 feet (45 to 65 meters by 91 to 110 meters); for international play the field cannot be smaller than 330 feet by 200 feet (101 by 61 meters). Lines on the field designate the goals, penalty areas, sidelines, and center of the field. While most modern bandy is played on artificially frozen fields, some games are played on natural ice, and the referee must inspect the ice to certify that its condition is appropriate for play. Bandy may be played either indoors or outdoors. In parts of the world where it is most popular, such as Sweden and Russia, indoor bandy arenas became popular in the late twentieth century.

Only one specific player position is defined by the rules, that of the goalkeeper, whose job is to guard the goal, though traditionally players specialize in much the same way soccer players do: by playing defense, offense (forwards), or as midfielders who intercept the ball from the opposing team and pass it to their own forwards.

Other soccer influences are seen in the rules as well. For instance, outfield players (players other than the goalkeeper) are forbidden from intentionally using their heads, hands, or arms to touch the bandy ball during play, though they may use their skates and other parts of their body (usually to intercept an airborne ball before regaining control of it with the bandy stick).

Strategy and Tactics

Because it takes place on a larger playing area, bandy requires more skating stamina than ice hockey; a bandy outfield player can expect to skate about ten miles over the course of a ninety-minute game. There is much less physical contact, and therefore fewer player injuries, due to the contact rules' being based on those of soccer and, therefore, prohibiting the body checking found in ice hockey. In fact, in the United States, many bandy players are former hockey players (college or professional) who have extended their sports careers by playing the less injury-prone bandy.

Bandy is a fast-moving game, and play is free-flowing and continuous unless the bandy ball is accidentally knocked out of the field of play or something happens to cause the referee to stop play (after which play resumes with a corner stroke, free stroke, or penalty shot, depending on the circumstance). For this reason, speed and player positioning are important. Players have a lot of ground to cover, and the ball travels quickly across the ice. Skating speed is important but so is anticipating potential opposing strategies and positioning players in advantageous places so that they're available to intercept, defend, or receive a pass, as the circumstances of the fast-paced game are constantly changing.

Bandy goalkeepers are the only bandy players who don't use sticks, and they must catch or block the bandy call with their hands, head, or body. This impacts the goaltending strategy, even the stance goalkeepers use, as they must move differently and react with different parts of their body than would a hockey goalkeeper.

Professional Leagues and Series

The Federation of International Bandy (FIB) was founded in 1955 and is headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden. It includes twenty-eight members: the Bandy Federation of Afghanistan, the Armenian National Federation of Bandy, the Belarusian Bandy Federation, Canada Bandy, the China Bandy Federation, the Colombia Federation of Skating Sports, the Czech Association of Bandy, the Estonian Bandy Association, Finland's Bandy Association, the German Bandy Association, the Great Britain Bandy Association, the Hungarian Bandy Federation, the Bandy federation of India, the Italian Bandy Federation, Japan Bandy Federation, Kazakhstan Bandy Federation, Latvia's Bandy Federation, Lithuanian Bandy Association, Bandy Federation of Mongolia, Bandy Bond Nederland, Norway's Bandy Association, All Russian Bandy Federation (which succeeded the Soviet Union's bandy association), the Slovak Bandy Association, Somali National Bandy Association, Swedish Bandy Association, Federation of Swiss Bandy, Ukrainian Bandy and Rink Bandy Federation, and American Bandy Association.

The Federation of International Bandy oversees the rules and regulations of bandy and rink bandy and the world championships thereof, promotes the development of bandy and rink bandy, and lobbies for bandy's inclusion in the Olympic Games.

The Bandy World Championship (of which the men's division has been held since 1957 and the women's since 2004) is held every year. Not all of the FIB member nations compete; the largest number of participants in 2016 was eighteen countries. The competition is divided into two groups with a round-robin stage and semifinals before the final championship match. The Russian team (if the Soviet years are included) has won the gold medal in more than half of the championships.

The Bandy World Cup is played by bandy clubs rather than national teams, and it has been held annually for both men's and women's clubs since 1974. With the exception of one year, every World Cup has been won by a Russian/Soviet or Swedish club. The exception was Oulun Luistinseura, one of the most successful Finnish sports clubs (a multi-sports club, originally founded by bandy players), in 1976.

In the United States, bandy is governed by the American Bandy Association, established in 1981. League play is organized by the American Bandy League, a ten-team league divided into two divisions, all of which play their games at the Guidant John Rose Minnesota Oval ice rink in Minnesota (which is also the home stadium of the national bandy team). Most of the teams are located in Minnesota.

Popularity

Modern ice hockey was developed in Canada around the same time bandy was organized in Europe, and in the 1920s, bandy's popularity declined after ice hockey became an Olympic sport. Only a few years after the first European bandy championship, bandy players began to move to hockey in the hope of competing in the Olympic games. The main exception was the Soviet Union, where ice hockey did not gain significant popularity until the Cold War period. In part because of bandy's popularity in Russia and former Soviet republics, where "hockey" often refers to bandy, while ice hockey is "hockey with puck," even in a century after its peak, bandy remains the second-most popular winter sport, exceeded only by ice hockey.

In the United States, bandy's popularity is strongest in Minnesota, one of the coldest states in the union as well as one with a strong hockey tradition. A small youth bandy program, consisting of several hundred players, is concentrated in the Roseville, Minnesota, area. The first US youth bandy championship game was held in 2014.

Bibliography

“Bandy.” SkateTheOval, www.skatetheoval.com/bandy. Accessed 24 Jan. 2025.

"Bandy: How Sweden's Little-Known Sport is Winning Fans." The Local, 29 Feb. 2016, www.thelocal.se/20160229/bandy-how-swedens-little-known-sport-is-winning-converts. Accessed 24 Jan. 2025.

Bordner, S. Seth. "'All-Things-Considered,' 'Better-Than,' and Sports Rankings." Journal of the Philosophy of Sport, vol. 43, no. 2, 2016, pp. 215–32.

“FIB History.” Federation of International Bandy, worldbandy.com/fib-history/. Accessed 24 Jan. 2025.

“Learn More about Bandy.” USA Bandy, 2024, www.usabandy.com/page/show/604524-learn-more-about-bandy. Accessed 24 Jan. 2025.

Risto, O., and T. Timpka. "Towards Safe Environments for Youth Sports: Impact of a Fair Play Programme on Injury Rates in Youth Bandy." International Journal of Injury Control & Safety Promotion, vol. 14, no. 3, 2007, pp. 189–91.

Thurber, B. A. "The Viking Ball Game." Scandinavian Studies, vol. 87, no. 2, Summer 2015, pp. 167–88. doi:10.1353/scd.2015.0015. Accessed 24 Jan. 2025.

Timpka, T., et al. "Injury Incidence in a Men's Elite Bandy League: An Epidemiological Study of a Full Regular Season." Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports, vol. 17, no. 6, 2007, pp. 636–40.