The final of the world championships this spring saw a flurry of first-half goals. Finland had pegged back Sweden to 1-1 after they took the lead, but two scores in as many minutes from Joel Broberg and Christoffer Edlund earned the Swedes a comfortable buffer heading into the break. There was no way back for Finland, and when the 90 minutes were up Sweden celebrated their 13th title.
This wasn’t a football tournament, though the similarities are uncanny: there were corners, offsides and 11 players per team. The sport of bandy is played on vast swathes of ice, up to 110 metres long and 65 metres wide, with curved sticks and a hard pink ball. To the untrained eye it seems like a variant of ice hockey, but the closer you look, the more the differences emerge.
It’s a global game: in Russia, Sweden’s counterpart as a great bandy power, it’s a national sport played by about a million people. Elsewhere it’s growing: India, Japan and Mongolia are members of the Federation of International Bandy (FIB).
So is Great Britain. Bandy originates in the villages of the Fens, East Anglia. But like so many things invented or codified in England it fizzled out, thriving better in the places where it was exported. I went to meet the enthusiasts, undaunted by obstacles and accidents, who have kickstarted the revival.
Bandy’s renaissance in England began in 2016, when Lyn Gibb de Swarte, the former British short-track speed skater, came across the game online. Lyn took over a dormant national federation of which she has become president. With her wife Cathy, she lives in Littleport, a few miles north-east of Ely. She hails, though, from south London, and learnt to skate as a child on Saturday mornings at Streatham Ice Arena. As we talked, Cathy, a former footballer, supplied tea, digestive biscuits and observations on the Premier League title race. Lyn pointed out the necklace she was wearing: a Star of David combined with a cross. ‘I’m a Jew,’ says Lyn, with playful firmness, when I ask whether she’s Jewish, though in religion, she tells me she’s a Christian.
Racing internationally as an amateur in the 1970s, Lyn helped to establish the UK’s first women’s ice hockey team, the Streatham Strikers – her preference was ‘Streatham Rebels’ – who played their debut fixture in 1982, wearing men’s protective pads. Her attempt to join the club committee at Streatham was met with chauvinist bluster; she does an excellent impression of a pompous male representative informing her that ‘the air of the committee was often decidedly blue’. After her retirement from racing she qualified as a referee and, in 1991, became the national speed-skating coach for post-apartheid South Africa. Her career has included a lifelong campaign to promote sport for women and to reject the gendering of certain attributes – pace, skill, controlled competition – as male. As journalists, she and Cathy have covered and promoted women’s sport of all kinds across the world.
Bandy appeals to Lyn for its lack of exaggerated machismo. Bodychecking is forbidden, unlike in ice hockey, whose original rules derive not from football but from rugby. ‘I always fought,’ she recalls, for women’s hockey to be ‘non-contact.’ Without realising, she was seeking out bandy, which places greater emphasis on skill than on brute strength. She calls bandy ‘the most egalitarian sport I know’. The word she often uses to describe the sport is ‘wholesome’, but without the connotation of propriety it sometimes carries: with its deft passing and possession-based tactics, the long dribbles and skilful skating enabled by its huge rink, bandy provides team spirit with a space for personal expressiveness.
Today, though, there is nowhere in the UK where bandy can be played in its true dimensions. Training sessions have taken place at the rink in Peterborough, which like many arenas in the UK doubles as an ice hockey stadium and a training centre for short-track and figure skating. No rink in the UK is big enough for bandy or long-track skating.
