Sport



To promote a healthy lifestyle the Riksțing stimulates people to join a sport club. The most popular sports in Friland are: athletics, volleyball, ice hockey, fives, shooting (bow and arrows, firearms, etc.), motocross, horse riding, ice skating and skiing.

Special sports
In Friland there are three sports that are not or hardly known abroad:

  • Sword dancing: the participants form a circle with drawn swords, after which they take turns performing a dance within the circle. Agility is very important in this to be able to evade the swords. These days mainly blunt swords are used but at the higher levels sharp swords are most usual. Sword dancing by the way, is a ritual that was performed during the Midwinter celebrations and only later became a sport.
  • Glima wrestling: this sport was brought to Friland by the Vikings but the local population quickly started to learn it as well. Glima wrestling is still very popular in Iceland as well by the way.
  • Swerdkunst: the art of the sword ("swerdkunst") is nowadays mainly limited to the Oriental forms like Kenjutsu, but in Friland the native sword tradition was preserved and people there still practice with the European broadswords of old.

    Football
    Even though football is immensely popular elsewhere Friland is terrible at it. The Frilandic national team, which plays in dark blue shirts with white shorts, usually does not get any further than the first round of the European or World Championships. Therefore every year there is a bet about how fast Friland will be tossed out and by whom. The absolute rock bottom was the year 2006, when Friland got its butt kicked by respectively Luxemburg, Moldavia, Slovakia and Liechtenstein. Hans Berhardssun, the chairman of the Frilandic football league, once said about this:
            'Friland is so incredibly bad at every important sport, that you never hear anything about us when it comes to sport. You would almost start to believe that our country doesn't exist!'


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