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Team Handball - Olympic Sport
To most North Americans, Handball conjures up images of smacking a ball against a wall with your hand. Team Handball conjures up images of, well, it doesn’t really conjure any images at all to most North Americans, but it's simply the most explosive team sport at the Summer Olympics. Unfortunately, you’ll be lucky to see more than a few minutes of television coverage, unless your satellite dish picks up a European broadcaster.
For about eight million registered players and hundreds of millions of fans in some 150 countries, though, team handball is synonymous with fast end-to-end action, inventive playmaking, bruising physical play, daring lunges toward the goal and fearless goalkeepers standing firm in the face of menacing attacks bearing down on them. In Europe, especially, where professional team handball leagues rival basketball in popularity behind only soccer, its stars are high-paid celebrities and among the world’s most gifted athletes.
A Similar Game Called Harpaston
Based on the basic elements of running, jumping and throwing -- the same elements of track and field -- it's not surprising that team handball has number ancient ancestors. Throwing-and-catching games are described by Homer in the "The Odyssey" and depicted in ancient Mexican art, and a game called Harpaston was apparently popular in ancient Rome.
Europe, particularly Germany and the Scandinavian countries, was the crucible for the game, as we know it today. By the time the rules became instituted early in the 20th century, team handball would be a composite of several other popular sports, with rules similar to soccer (albeit without the kicking); positional play, scoring strategies and passing patterns resembling water polo; and ball movement and airborne acrobatics right out of basketball. All that with the intensity, speed and physical contact with hockey.
An outdoor version of team handball -- also known as field ball -- played with 11 players a side made a false start at the Olympics with an appearance at the 1936 Berlin Games, with the Germans pleasing Hitler by winning the gold. It was dropped from the Olympic roster until 1972, by which time the 11-player outdoor game had been replaced by the seven-player indoor sport developed in Scandinavia. A women's Olympic tournament was added in 1976.
Over the last 20 years, the Soviet Union, which became Russia in the meantime, and Sweden shared the honors with 3 titles for the former and 2 for the latest. Only Yugoslavia 1986 and France in 1995 made it to the top. In France 2001, Sweden and Russia are once again the true favorites: Russia hoping to catch on Romania and Sweden with 4 titles, and Sweden trying to grab a fifth crown, the first of the 21st century.
History
The legacy of the ancient Greek Olympics includes the track and field staples of running, jumping and throwing. Those are the core elements of team handball -- another sport that the Greeks of antiquity seem to have played in some form. At least, a game resembling handball is depicted on Greek carvings dating back to 600 B.C., and earlier still, Homer writes rapturously of a similar sport called Uranias in The Odyssey. There are even accounts of Alexander the Great playing a version of the game.
Ancient Ancestors
But given that running, jumping and throwing are among the most basic of athletic skills, it’s not surprising that, like soccer, variants of team handball have been played for millennia.
Similar game shows up in ancient Mexican art, while the Romans, who were great fans of ball games, played one called Harpaston in which teammates threw the ball amongst themselves, keeping possession from opponents. References to catching and throwing games are peppered throughout European history -- one of them described by the Rabelais, the 16th-Century French author of Gargantua and Pantagruel.
The sport started to evolve into its current form in Denmark, where rules were set in place by 1848. By the end of the century a German gymnastics instructor, Konrad Koch, had developed a sport call Raffball, no doubt using his background to help inspire the acrobatic aerial maneuvering that has become the most spectacular part of the modern game.
The Modern Game
While the Swedish were the first to use the term "handball" in 1910, Frederik Knudsen set down rules for the sport in Denmark in 1911. The Danish version had seven players a side, while the German had 11. It was also known as field ball or field handball, since it was still an outdoor sport.
Team handball started to catch on throughout Europe in 1912, when Carl Hirschmann, the honorary secretary of the International Football Association, encouraged players to pick up field handball to stay in shape during the off-season. Not surprisingly, when the rules for team handball began to take their current form in 1917, they resembled those of football, or soccer, complete with throw-ins, and free kicks and penalty kicks replaced by free throws and penalty throws.
Olympic Debut
Germany and Austria squared off in the first international game in 1925, with the Germans winning 6-3. In 1928, team handball-playing nations formed the International Amateur Handball Federation, an organization that had 23 member nations by the time the sport made its debut on a global stage at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.
The 11-player outdoor version was played on a field resembling a soccer pitch at the Berlin Games, with the results Hitler expected -- Germany won the gold, with its alpine neighbors Austria and Switzerland winning the silver and bronze, respectively. The sport was then dumped from the Olympic schedule, while it developed further as an indoor sport in the Scandinavian countries that were looking for a new indoor sport to play during their long winters.
Bordenball
Around the end of the Second World War, team handball made its way to Eastern and Central Canada, largely introduced by European immigrants. Ontario army base Camp Borden was one of the first places team handball was played in Canada -- hence the version of team handball known as Bordenball that many Canadians have played in high school phys-ed.
By the 1960s, the seven-player indoor version had carried the day, and the last outdoor world championships were held in 1966. Team handball was reinstated as an Olympic sport for men at the 1972 Munich Games, but the power had shifted to the Eastern Bloc by then, with Yugoslavia winning gold, followed by the Czechs and Romanians.
Women’s Olympic Debut
The women’s event was added four years later in Montreal with similar results, the Soviet Union winning the gold, followed by East Germany and Hungary. In fact, from 1972 to 1980, no country outside the Communist Bloc won a men’s or women’s team handball medal. Overall, the Soviet Union won five gold medals (including one as the Unified Team of 1992) and Yugoslavia has won three, while the former Yugoslav republic of Croatia won the men’s gold medal in 1996 -- the first gold medal won by the fledgling nation.
Eastern Europe has remained strong, but in recent years, South Korea has been the dominant force in women’s Olympic team handball, winning the gold in 1988 and 1992 and the silver in 1996. Meanwhile, the Scandinavian roots of modern team handball have finally been reflected in the medals -- Denmark won the women’s gold in 1996, while the Norwegians won silver in 1988 and 1992. |
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