What is Bandy?

Bandy is played on an ice surface the size of a soccer field. It is best described as field hockey on skates. Each team is made up of 11 players including a goalkeeper. The aim of bandy is to score goals by hitting an orange ball the size of a tennis ball into the opposing team's net with a curved stick four feet in length. The blades of most bandy sticks are wrapped in leather strapping which allows the player to put spin on the ball when he or she strikes it. The ball has a cork center and a hard rubber cover. The goal measures seven feet by eleven and a half feet. While the goalkeeper wears more padding than other players he or she does not use a stick. Goalies are the only player allowed to use their hands to control the ball. Games consist of two 45 minute halves. A ten minute interval takes place at half-time when the teams change ends. Ties are broken with 15 minute overtime periods. The rules of bandy are very similar to the rules of soccer. A variation on bandy is rink bandy. Rink bandy is played on a hockey rink with four skaters and a goalie. The rules are generally the same as those for regular bandy.

A Brief History of Bandy

Bandy was being played in northeast England in the mid 1800's. Bury Fen, England, is considered the home of modern bandy. Cave paintings in Egypt suggest that a game similar to bandy was being played there 4000 years ago. The word bandy is Welsh in origin and means "a curved stick". The National Bandy Association was established in England in 1891. The NBA was the first governing body of Bandy and the first to develop official rules for the game. Prior to the founding of the NBA teams established the rules before matches started. The first international Bandy match took place in 1891 between England's Bury Fen club and Haarlem of the Netherlands. Bandy was introduced to Sweden by a Bury Fen player in 1894. Bandy soon caught on throughout Europe. Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands, Russia, and Norway all became active in bandy. Between the 1890's and 1955 no formal governing body for international Bandy existed. This changed with the creation of the International Bandy Federation in 1955. Since 1957 the World Championships have been held every two years.

World Championships

The Bandy World Championships have been held since 1957 with Russia and Sweden dominating. Another major international tournament is the World Cup in Ljusdal, Sweden. This annual tournament is held in October with the best club teams from each country competing.

WORLD CHAMPIONS:1957 USSR, 1961 USSR, 1963 USSR, 1965 USSR, 1967 USSR, 1971 USSR, 1973 USSR, 1975 USSR, 1977 USSR, 1979 USSR, 1981 Sweden, 1983 Sweden, 1985 USSR, 1987 Sweden, 1989 USSR, 1991 USSR, 1993 Sweden, 1995 Sweden, 1997 Sweden, 1999 Russia.
All results from the World Championships are found here.

WORLD CUP CHAMPIONS: 1974 Sandviken (Swe), 1975 Broberg (Swe), 1976 OLS Oulu (Fin), 1977 Broberg (Swe), 1978 Broberg (Swe), 1979 Edsbyn (Swe), 1980 Boltic (Swe), 1981 Boltic (Swe), 1982 Jenisej (USSR), 1983 Broberg (Swe), 1984 Jenisej (USSR), 1985 Boltic (Swe), 1986 Boltic (Swe), 1987 Västerås (Swe), 1988 Vetlanda (Swe), 1989 Västerås (Swe), 1990 Zorkij (Rus), 1991 Edsbyn (Swe), 1992 Sirius (Swe), 1993 Vetlanda (Swe), 1994 Västerås (Swe), 1995 Boltic (Swe), 1996 Boltic (Swe), 1997 Västerås (Swe), 1998 Falun (Swe), 1999 Hammarby (Swe).

Hockey is Canada's national game and its greatest contribution to world sport. A major winter preoccupation of Canada's male youth for almost 100 years, ice hockey is now played seriously in 20 countries. The word "hockey" is probably derived from the French hoquet ("shepherd's crook"), referring to the shape of the stick, and the nickname "shinny" for informal hockey likely comes from the game's origins in shinty.

Ice hockey doubtless originated in the stick and ball games of bandy, shinty and hurley, each of which was brought to the colonies in one form or another by students or the military since the 10th century. Of these, it is likely bandy, which is played on ice with goalkeepers, stick and ball, that is the truest forerunner of hockey. The oldest record of bandy is a 13th-century painted glass window in Canterbury Cathedral, where a boy is seen holding a curved stick in one hand and a ball in the other. A similar game called "kolv" is pictured in many Dutch 16th- and 17th-century paintings. However, kolv was not a team sport and seems to have been more like "golf on ice."Bandy was introduced into Scandinavia, Switzerland and Germany in the early 1890s. Indeed, when the teams from those regions arrived at the first winter Olympic games, they intended to play a game more like bandy than Canadian ice hockey.

Wherever there is pictorial or literary evidence that a game of bandy was played on ice in early Canada, local enthusiasts claim to have discovered the birthplace of ice hockey. Thus, Halifax and Windsor, Nova Scotia, and Kingston, Ontario, have variously put forward their claim. (Dutch immigrants played a version of kolv in colonial New York as well.) The last quarter of the 19th century was the great period of social organization, and during this time many sports moved out of long periods of unwritten rules and widely differing local variation towards standardization. Shinty's rules were set in 1879 and those for bandy in 1891. Organized ice hockey, as we would recognize it today, has its true origins in Montréal in 1875, where J.G.A. Creighton, a McGill student, established a set of formal rules.The key innovation was the substitution of a flat, wooden disk (puck), which offered the players far more control than they had over a ball. No sensible origin has been found for the word "puck."