Finland on vo.rs

The Wife-Carrying World Championships: The Prize Is the Wife's Weight in Beer

Sat, 12 Jul 2025 09:00:00 +0000

The finish straight at Sonkajärvi is 253.5 metres of sand and gravel with a chest-deep pit of brown water dug into the middle of it, and the man barrelling towards you has a fully grown adult hanging upside-down off his back like a rucksack that grew legs. She is gripping his waist with both hands. Her ankles are hooked over his shoulders. Her head is somewhere around his kidneys. He can’t see her, she can’t see where they’re going, and the pair of them are moving at a speed that would embarrass most club runners on dry, unencumbered ground. This is the Wife-Carrying World Championships, and the winner will be handed his teammate’s exact bodyweight in beer.

The Hobbyhorse Championships: Finland's Most Earnest Sport

Sat, 15 Jun 2024 09:00:00 +0000

At a Finnish sports hall you will find a full showjumping arena — poles, rails, a proper course, a judging table, an anxious hush before each round — and the horses are made of fabric and a stick. This is the Finnish Hobbyhorse Championships, and if your first instinct is to laugh, hold that thought, because the athleticism on display will stop you doing it twice.

I cover loud rooms and physical crowds for a living, and I came to hobbyhorsing the way most outsiders do — through a viral clip, ready to smirk. What I found instead was one of the most quietly impressive subcultures in the Nordic region, a homegrown Finnish phenomenon run largely by and for teenage girls, built on real craft, real fitness, and a startling amount of nerve. It deserves to be written about with the same respect I would give any scene that means something to the people inside it.

The Air Guitar World Championships: Absurdity With a Peace-and-Love Manifesto

Fri, 25 Aug 2023 09:00:00 +0000

Every August, in a mid-sized city 500-odd kilometres north of Helsinki, a crowd gathers in the market square to watch grown adults play guitars that do not exist. There is a stage, a proper PA, a panel of judges with scorecards, a compère, and stakes that the organisers will tell you, entirely straight-faced, involve the future of the human species. The instrument is imaginary. The championship is not. Welcome to Oulu, and to the single most Finnish sporting event ever devised.

Heavy Metal Knitting World Championship

Sat, 22 Jul 2023 09:00:00 +0000

Picture a proper metal stage — a wall of amps, a headbanging crowd, the whole eastern-Finnish summer roaring at full volume — and then look at what the performers are holding. Not guitars. Needles and yarn. The Heavy Metal Knitting World Championship is exactly what it sounds like, and it is one of the finest things Finland has ever done to a music festival, which for a country that gave us Air Guitar is saying something.

Nummirock: Midsummer Metal in a Finnish Forest

Tue, 27 Jun 2023 09:00:00 +0000

Every year on midsummer weekend, a few thousand Finns drive into a pine forest near a lake called Nummijärvi and spend the brightest nights of the calendar in front of a stage that never really goes dark. This is Nummirock, and I have never been, because midsummer is when I am usually standing in a field in Roskilde. That timing collision is the whole story of why Nummirock stays a well-kept Finnish secret to the rest of us.

Tuska: Helsinki's Midsummer Metal Ritual

Tue, 11 Oct 2022 09:00:00 +0000

Finland has more metal bands per head of population than any country on earth, a statistic that has become a national in-joke and a genuine cultural fact. In a country of five and a half million people, heavy metal is not a subculture skulking at the edges; it is mainstream enough that a monster band won the Eurovision Song Contest for Finland and the president has been photographed at metal shows. Tuska is where that saturated national obsession gathers once a year, in the concrete yard of a decommissioned power plant in the middle of Helsinki, and its name is Finnish for pain.

Mobile Phone Throwing: Finland's Sport of Hurling Your Nokia

Sat, 13 Aug 2022 09:00:00 +0000

In the year 2000, in the Finnish lake town of Savonlinna, somebody decided the most satisfying thing you could do with an obsolete mobile phone was to throw it as far as humanly possible. They were, of course, completely correct. Thus was born the Mobile Phone Throwing World Championship, and Finland added another entry to its remarkable catalogue of taking a joke entirely seriously.

The origin story is almost too good. The event was launched by a Savonlinna translation and interpretation company, whose multinational staff apparently had a lot of frustration and a lot of dead handsets to work through. The two problems solved each other. You take yesterday’s technology, you wind up, you hurl it across a field, and the local recycling centre collects the wreckage afterwards. Catharsis and waste management in one clean motion. It has run in Savonlinna most years since, usually in late summer.

Swamp Football World Championships

Sat, 30 Jul 2022 09:00:00 +0000

Take a game of football, remove the pitch, and replace it with a peat bog that swallows your leg to the knee on every stride. That is swamp football — suopotkupallo — and every summer a few hundred teams travel to a remote corner of northern Finland to play it on purpose, at speed, until they can barely stand. It is exhausting to watch. It looks like the most fun you can have with your boots full of mud.