Gotland Olympics

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With the Stångasspiele ( Swedish Stångaspelen ), a sporting event takes place every year on the second weekend in July on the Stängmalmen meadow in Stånga , which is also known as the Gotland Olympics ( Swedish Gutarnas olymp ). The Games were first held in 1924, but their origins, like that of the Highland Games in Scotland , go back further.

Gotland pentathlon

The Gotland pentathlon (Gutnisk femkamp) is contested , to which

The aim is to qualify for the next discipline. In the end, there are two athletes left who will determine the overall winner in the wrestling match (ryggkast) .

Varpkastning

The most popular Gotland sport discipline is stone throwing, also known as Varpkastning . It probably has its roots in the Viking Age . Two players or teams aim over a distance of 20 m (women: 15 m) with a disc-like stone at a row of sticks placed in the playing field. Whoever comes closest to the stick has won it, whereby the stone can be kicked away by the opponent. For this reason, the stone weighs up to 5 kg and the players put it in rotation so that it digs into the ground and can no longer roll. The winner is the team that was the first to win 12 bars. The sport comes in several variations. With the centimeter kastning there are 36 throws, in which the distances to the rod are measured. At the end you add up the results. Whoever gets the fewest centimeters has won.

Park

Many spectators are also drawn to the park or parkspelet , a ball game that - roughly simplified - looks like tennis without a racket. Every year around 70 teams register their participation. The sport probably came to the Baltic Sea island in the Middle Ages, through someone who had seen the Jeu de Paume in northern France , with which nobles measured their strength. The Gotland Park is played with two teams of seven players each. The ball is as big as a tennis ball and consists of a mesh with a thin leather skin. The aim of the serving team is to hit the ball so hard with their bare hand into the 200 × 70 cm field that the defender has no way of getting it back into play.

Stångstörtning

Stångstörtning is an exhausting discipline, in which the aim is to throw a 26 kg heavy and 4.5 m long tree trunk as far as possible. It is similar to the Tossing the Caber of the Highland Games . In fact, Gotland and Scotland are the only regions in Europe where this sport has survived, albeit with different rules. On Gotland the distance decides, in Scotland the direction of the lying tree trunk.

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