Bandy
Bandy is a winter sport and ball sport played by two teams wearing ice skates on a large ice surface while using sticks to direct a ball into the opposing team's goal. Bandy is sometimes considered the predecessor of ice hockey, both sports belonging to a family of sports called hockey.
The playing surface, called a bandy field or bandy rink, is a sheet of ice which measures by, about the size of a football pitch. The field is considerably larger than the ice rinks commonly used for ice hockey.
The sport has a common background with association football, ice hockey, shinty, and field hockey. Bandy's origins are debatable, but its first rules were organized and published in England in 1882.
Internationally, bandy's strongest nations in both men's and women's competitions have long been Sweden and Russia; both countries have established professional men's bandy leagues. In Russia, it is estimated that more than one million people play bandy. The sport also has organized league play and fans in other countries, including Finland, Norway, and Kazakhstan. The premier international bandy competition for men is the Bandy World Championship and for women it is the Women's Bandy World Championship.
Organized bandy started in the late 19th century; however, until 1955, there was no established international governing body for the sport. The international governing body for bandy today is the Federation of International Bandy which formed in February 1955. In 2001, bandy was recognized as a sport by the International Olympic Committee. Both traditional eleven-a-side bandy and rink bandy are recognized by the IOC. Based on the number of participating athletes, the FIB has claimed bandy is the world's second-most participated winter sport after ice hockey.
History
Background
The earliest origin of the sport is debated. Though many Russians see their old countrymen as the creators of the sport – reflected by the unofficial title for bandy, "Russian hockey" – Russia, Sweden, medieval Iceland, the Netherlands, England, and Wales each had pastimes, such as bando, which can be seen as forerunners of bandy. The mid-eighteenth-century Devonshire Dialogue collection lists Bandy as "a game, like that of Golf, in which the adverse parties endeavour to beat a ball opposite ways... the stick with which the game is played is crook'd at the end".The sport's first published set of organized rules was codified in 1882 by Charles Goodman Tebbutt of the Bury Fen Bandy Club. When the international federation was founded in 1955, it came about after a compromise between Russian and English rules, in which more of the English rules prevailed.
Since association football was already popular in England, the codified bandy rules took after much of the football rules. Like association football, games are normally two 45 minute halves and there are 11 players per side. Players sticks are curved like large field hockey sticks and the bandy ball is roughly the size of a tennis ball with a cork core and hard plastic coating. Bandy balls were originally usually red but are now either orange or more commonly cerise.
Early days
19th Century: the sport is formalised
Bandy as an ice skating sport first developed in Britain. It developed as a winter sport in the Fens of East Anglia. Large expanses of ice would form on the flooded meadows or shallow washes in cold winters where fen skating, which has been a tradition dating back to at least medieval times, took place. Bandy's early recorded modernization period can be traced back to 1813.Image:Bandybollar.jpg|thumb|right|Making of a historic bandy ball in stages, from the original cork on the left to the final ball painted red, with a modern bandy ball to far right
Members of the Bury Fen Bandy Club published rules of the game in 1882, and introduced it into other European countries. A variety of stick and ball games involving ice skating were introduced to North America by the 1800s but failed to organize and develop popular rules codes. However, these stick and ball games became one of the eventual antecedents of the modern sport of ice hockey, whose first rules were codified in Canada in 1875, almost a decade before the rules of modern bandy were established in Britain.
The first international bandy match took place in 1891 between Bury Fen and the Haarlemsche Hockey & Bandy Club from the Netherlands. The same year, the National Bandy Association was established as a governing body for the sport in England. National governing federations for bandy were also founded in the 1890s in the Netherlands and Russia and in the following decade in Finland, Sweden, and Norway.
The match later dubbed "the original bandy match", was actually held in 1875 at The Crystal Palace in London. However, at the time, the game was called "hockey on the ice", probably as it was considered an ice variant of field hockey.
An early maker of bandy sticks was the firm of Gray's, Cambridge. One such stick, now in the collections of the Museum of Cambridge, has a length of rope twisted round the handle to rescue any player who might fall through the ice, as the game was played on frozen lakes back then. An 1899 photo of two players demonstrating the game shows the sticks being held single-handed.
Historically, bandy was a popular sport in some central and western European countries until the First World War, and from 1901 to 1926 it was played in the Scandinavian Nordic Games, the first international multi-sport event focused on winter sports.
First national bandy league
The first national bandy league in modern history was started in Sweden in 1902.Bandy in the Nordic Games
Bandy was played at the Nordic Games in both Stockholm and Kristiania in 1901, 1903, 1905, 1909, 1913, 1917, 1922 and 1926, and between Swedish, Finnish and Russian teams at similar games in Helsinki in 1907. Bandy appeared as a sport in all eight editions of the Nordic Games from 1901 to 1926.Bandy at the Winter Spartakiad
The Spartakiad was an international multisport event arranged by workers' sports clubs in the 1920s and 1930s and sponsored by the Soviet Union. In the first Winter Spartakiad, held in Oslo, Norway, in 1928, bandy was played by teams from Norway, the Soviet Union and Sweden.Etymology
The sport's English name comes from the verb "to bandy", from the Middle French bander, and originally referred to a seventeenth-century Irish game similar to field hockey. The curved stick was also called a "bandy". The etymological connection to the similarly named Welsh hockey game of bando is not clear.An old name for bandy is hockey on the ice; in the first rule books from England at the turn of the century 1900, the sport is literally called "bandy or hockey on the ice". Since the early 20th century, the term bandy is usually preferred to prevent confusion with ice hockey.
The sport is known as bandy in many languages, with a few exceptions. In Russia, bandy is called "Russian hockey" or more frequently, and officially, "hockey with a ball" while ice hockey is called "hockey with a puck" or more frequently just "hockey". If the context makes it clear that bandy is the subject, it as well can be called just "hockey". In Belarusian, Ukrainian and Bulgarian it is also called "hockey with a ball". In Slovak "bandy hockey" is the name. In Armenian, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Mongol and Uzbek, bandy is known as "ball hockey". In Finnish the two sports are distinguished as "ice ball" and "ice puck", as well as in Hungarian, although in Hungarian it is more often called "bandy" nowadays. In Estonian and Lithuanian bandy is also called "ice ball". In Mandarin Chinese it is "bandy ball". In Scottish Gaelic the name is "ice shinty". In old times shinty or shinney were also sometimes used in English for bandy.
Because of its similarities with association football, bandy is also nicknamed "winter football".
Historical relationship with other sports
Bandy and association football
With association football and hockey on ice or bandy both being popular sports in parts of Europe around 1900, bandy was highly influenced by football and taking after its main rules: having a field approximately the same size, having the same number of players on each team and having the same game time. It is natural that bandy got the nickname 'winter football'.It was common for sports clubs to have both a bandy and a football section, with athletes playing both sports but at different times of the year. Some examples are Nottingham Forest Football and Bandy Club in England and Norwegian Strømsgodset IF and Mjøndalen IF, with both having an active bandy section.
In Sweden, most football clubs that were active during the first half of the 20th century also played bandy. Swedish player Orvar Bergmark earned silver medals in the world championships of both sports in the 1950s. Later, as the season for each sport increased in time, it was not as easy for the players to engage in both sports, so some clubs came to concentrate on one or the other. Many old clubs still have both sports on their program. Sten-Ove Ramberg is the last Swedish male player in both national teams.
Bandy and ice hockey
No clear distinction between bandy and ice hockey was made before the 1920s. As bandy in a way can be seen as a precursor to ice hockey, bandy has influenced the development and history of ice hockey, mainly in European and former Soviet countries. While modern ice hockey was created in Canada, a variety of games which bore a closer resemblance to bandy were initially played there after British soldiers introduced the game of bandy in the late 19th century. At the same time as modern ice hockey rules were formalized in British North America, bandy rules were decided upon in Europe. A cross between English and Russian bandy rules eventually developed with the football-inspired English rules becoming dominant, together with the Russian low-border along most of the two sidelines, an addition to the sport which has maintained its presence since the 1950s.Before Canadians introduced ice hockey into Europe in the early 20th century, "hockey" was another name for bandy, and still is in parts of Russia and Kazakhstan.
Both bandy and ice hockey were played in Europe during the 20th century, especially in Sweden, Finland, and Norway. Ice hockey became more popular than bandy in most of Europe, mostly because it had become an Olympic sport, while bandy had not. Athletes in Europe who had played bandy switched to ice hockey in the 1920s to compete in the Olympics. The smaller ice fields needed for ice hockey also made its rinks easier to maintain, especially in countries with short winters. On the other hand, ice hockey was not played in the Soviet Union until the 1950s, when the USSR wanted to compete internationally. The typical European style of ice hockey, with flowing, less physical play, represents a heritage of bandy.